Cap and Dividend

For California to meet its AB32 goals, the state will need to do more than just tinkering with its energy and transportation systems.

Who took the state to court over their efforts to protect the climate this time? Not the oil companies, coal-dependent utilities, or Tea Partiers. No, this time it was environmental justice interests.

I enjoyed the holidays in an old farm house nestled on a pastured hillside in the western part of the Catskill Mountains. The state park is our neigh...

UN delegates have been meeting for 18 years. Hasn't anyone figured out a concept that would unify the countries around a single framework? How about equity?

Senator Kerry and Senator Lieberman are telling everybody who has a microphone that their climate bill isn't dead. But their aggressive reassurances are misplaced energy.

I've worked for almost 20 years to stop global warming and yet I felt joy when the Senate global warming bill began to unravel. How did we get here?

All of this talk of offsets needlessly complicates the basics of a carbon permit system. Polluters pay, and people get the money. That's the way you do it.

The key to success for a new climate boss will be in finding common ground for both low-emitting and high-emitting countries, and the key to that is an equity framework such as Cap & Share or Cap & Dividend.

Is climate change legislation dead for the foreseeable future? Maybe not. There's still a sleeper bill that tackles carbon emissions and puts money into American's pockets that is now picking up steam.

The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, and if we don't do something BIG to really start reducing greenhouse gas emissions after that, we are screwed in a big, Emmerich-movie-like way.

A proposed anti-global warming bill would help the U.S. make a fair, affordable transition to a clean-energy, low-carbon economy, and avoid the pitfalls of other climate bills that pander to the coal-burning utilities.

I don't blame Dorgan and Pomeroy for being sceptical of the "postage stamp" strategy. Their state will face major costs, and the strategy puts supporters at risk in the 2010 or 2012 elections.

Fuel and electricity costs are highly visible, but under Waxman-Markey, the benefits to consumers will be mostly invisible.

It would be as if the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 legislated monetary policy through 1940. Ridiculous, right? I mean, who had the crystal ball to predict that Great Depression thing?

Unfortunately, the economics of estimating how much climate policy might cost households has almost as many variables and feedback loops as climate science.

Two climate change bills were introduced last week. If we liken these two bills to race horses, they have just left the gate and they have many laps still to go

Enter the Great Third Way, more formally known as cap-and-dividend. The cap part is familiar--a set number of pollution permits would be auctioned off...

A cap-and-dividend system would move energy markets toward clean fuels while generating billions of dollars in monthly dividend checks shared equally by all American families, guaranteed.

If environmental protection is a "luxury," then developing countries should emit as much as they need to, then when they're wealthier, create environmental laws to deal with the mess.

Here's an entertaining, possibly emerging trend I should have predicted: cartoons used to explain green issues or technologies. Last week, someone se...