Yesterday I attended Dr. James Hansen's 20th anniversary of his meeting with Congress when he delivered his message about the severity of global warming. Yesterday's talk was a little different. History has proven Hansen to be correct and now we must act. Hansen stressed the importance of moving into a green economy—a low carbon economy that is consumer focused. Hansen along with 1Sky, where I am interning this summer both believe that switching to a green economy has the greatest opportunity to increase the quality of life for all Americans. Hansen was a proponent of a carbon tax on coal, oil and gas; one that goes back to the public and ultimately stimulates the economy. Dr. Hansen said, "If we had a carbon tax we'd have $4 gas, but it would be staying in the US and not going to Saudi Arabia."

Fossil fuels are a finite resource. We are going to run out! Shouldn't we prepare for the future and learn to live without them as soon as possible? A green economy will not only prepare us for the future, but it will also boost the American economy and increase the number of available jobs. The politicians and big businesses that continue to fight the scientific facts concerning global warming have mislead the American public. Let's change that! Thanks for your great blog! Keep up the great work!

I will agree that the climate is complex and variable. No one who understands anything about the way that it functions claims that temperatures will steadily rise, especially when measured over very brief periods like a single year.

My prediction is that there will be some complicating factors in global temperatures for a few years, especially since many developing countries like China and India are producing their growing electrical power needs by burning billions of tons of coal in fairly primitive plants.

The soot that those plants produce is spread over a wide enough area to provide some amount of shading and reflectivity – the "greenhouse" is kind of dirty these days, just like it was in the 1940s-1960s when Europe and the US used similar technologies for power production. (It is sometimes possible to see soot from China in the Eastern Pacific. Some even report that it reaches California.)

Soon enough – perhaps ten years, perhaps twenty, the people living in China and India will demand cleaner air and the smokestacks will be fitted with bag houses and scrubbers to make the emissions less noxious. However, if nothing else is done, I predict that warming will then return to center stage, powered by a few more decades worth of CO2 that has been added.

Are you really willing to continue putting stuff in the air without working hard to ensure that the people making that choice have to pay the costs?

Yes, if you are a big emitter, I want my government – as my representative – to charge you for the privilege of dumping your waste into my small piece of the global atmosphere. My expectation and demand is that the government will share those revenues on a per capita basis.

I would start with any new revenues being directed providing a standard deduction for FICA taxes from both employee and employer. FICA is a real discouragement for those just entering or reentering the work force because it starts on the very first dollar earned.

I used to be the General Manager at a small factory that had some jobs that could be filled by people with little education or skill, but who were willing to work hard and learn. I hated having to hand a formerly unemployed person a first paycheck with 7.6% taken out for FICA taxes. I could see the frustration on their faces as they realized how many bottles of milk or loaves of bread that money could have purchased.

I never had the heart to tell them that we could have afforded to bump their pay up by another 7.6% if we did not have to match that payment with a separate "employer's share" that did not even show up on their pay stubs. For workers at the very bottom of the scale, an extra 15.2% would go a long way in covering any increases in energy costs caused by a system that charged for the service of using our common sky as a dumping ground.

Most of the grid power near where I live (although I am not connected but my school is) comes from hydroelectricity and is relatively cheap; however the dams are wreaking havoc on the rivers and destroying the salmon population.

I am one of those folks that thinks this bill is better off not becoming law. Once we were to lock ourselves into this particular cap-and-trade program, we would have found it difficult to get out of. As is the case with virtually any government program, once they have established systemic roots, they are very difficult to change and/or get rid of.

Lieberman-Warner was way too soft and it would have given a free ride to the major industrial polluters for far too long. In essence, these polluters would have been allowed to grow their carbon emissions for several years before they would have to do anything about it.

We need to put a tax on carbon sooner, not later. Yes, prices of things will go up. But that is something we will have to live with. We need to talk about doing away with income taxes and putting the tax burden on the polluters that are filling the atmosphere with GHGs.

And yes, I know the polluters are ultimately me and you, as opposed to some imaginary fatcat who wears a monocle and smokes cigars. The polluters are ultimately me and you.

In fact, I get about 90% of my electricity from coal (much higher than the national average). And I am doing everything in my powers to change that. I know my electricity bills will jump. But industrial polluters are getting a free ride in terms of their waste (and have gotten one for the last two hundred years).