OK, we need two things. First, a long-range plan to reduce man-made CO2 inputs, with all the attendant greenhouses gases.  Second, we need to help some people with some rather serious problems happening already.  

And you know, we might start working on the second part because all kinds of new bugs are going to start growing the more it warms up. I'm serious, stuff like as tiger mosquitoes and dengue fever are headed up north. So we have to plan for stuff like that.

From my disco days:  "do it, just do it man."

Onward through the fog

Having reached the end point with my Wall Street focus, along comes the great international credit crunch and panic.  And, wow.  Wall Street saddled up and became the search and rescue team on steroids.  Maybe it is too late to stave off serious and long-term economic recession in the US and non-commodity export nations but there is a lesson here.  Wall Street will act in its collective self-interest and the better we understand whom those self-interest are, the more likely we can affect their behavior.

The many billions of shares traded every hour around the globe are not the work of day-traders sitting at the kitchen table.  Pension and mutual funds are the major betters and day traders hang out t the $2 window.  

Putting an increasingly higher price on carbon and making bettors understand the risk of betting on carbon-overweight stocks will eventually have a desired effect because share earnings will diminish as production costs increase faster than consumer income.

Imagine midwestern electric customers having to absorb a 10 cent/kilowatt-hour charge--bringing those customers into line with prices paid by New England customers (supplied mainly by gas/oil/hydro and nuke sources).  The Midwesterns would revolt and either the US economy would collapse or non-carbon electric power sources would come streaming into that market region.  Capital for the new low/no-carbon generating equipment would be derived either by borrowing at likely high ROR rates or by shareholder equity.

It is hard for me to imagine "Global Wall Street" operating in any other way.

John L. McCormick

Which is precisely how we got got into the current fix, along with a shrinking dollar and a housing bubble. My conclusion is that a carbon tax wouldn't change things very much, other than to pass through costs to the ultimate consumer. Wall Street is not there to absorb any of those costs, but simply to bet by placing a short or long position on anything.

But if consumers react, watch out because over a third of the US economy is simply driven by consumers. In other words, Wall Street had little societal benefit to anybody besides some very rich traders themselves.  

Many economists thing we're already in a recession and their numbers prove it. With tightening budgets, less money is available for nice Climate Change programs. Those opposing forces, shrinking liquidity and expanding need for Climate Change action, is a tough topic to predict.

But if calamities happen, the people consumers pay for it if they can see it. Incidents like Bhopal really get people. An example of "Bhopal" incidents would be the remarkable growth in wildfires out west. As we run out of money to fight the fires, more people are building in sensitive fire zones! Obviously, climate change will have an impact there, since we can't afford to keep [literally] burning our money in a senseless way.

Discussion of disasters linked to Climate Change are pouring in every day. The only exception, as I have noted before, is that there is no clear proof that hurricanes are getting worse. Amazing though, with less hurricane risk over the last two years Wall Street has jacked up coastal insurance by approximately a factor of two.  

Let's face it, Wall Street is in la-la land and is no longer relevant to consumers except when it bites them in the butt.
-sam

Onward through the fog

And we need to be more compassionate. When I read some of the "solutions" and attitudes in some Grist posts toward the so-called general populace, especially when referring to people in the US, I admit I cringe at times. For instance, there's a certain arrogance when one talks about rising food prices due to high energy costs, corn for fuel, whatever the reason, and then saying something like, "Well, it might help the obesity epidemic". As if fat people were the problem and making it harder for them to buy food was a good thing. Those attitudes are not endearing.

Fact is, we're all going to have to get used to paying more for things we had come to rely on being cheap. Like food and gas and heating oil. This is the way it is now. Fact also is, if we're going to be good and compassionate people we're going to have to figure out a way that these rising costs don't unfairly hit poor people, in other countries and in our own. And we need to wake up right now and realize that they already are, that people are freezing and going hungry and losing their homes or apartments and eating less nutritious food and not all of these are those we would have labeled "poor" even two or three years ago.(And they're not all fat either.) Times are changing very quickly and we need to deal with the reality of it now.