Dot Earth - the New York Times' climate change/environment/green issues blog by Andrew C. Revkin has a great new post about "Paying the Cost of Climate Change". Here follow the opening paragraphs:"Peter Barnes, a founder of Working Assets, the fund making “socially responsible” investments, has long studied various bills and proposals for cutting emissions of carbon dioxide to limit global warming. He sees fatal flaws in every one. So he has come up with a new formula that he says uniquely addresses the most inconvenient truth about climate policy: It will be expensive.
"As he put it recently: “Fighting climate change is going to cost all of us money. That’s because the price of dumping carbon into the atmosphere must, necessarily, rise. Whether the price rise is prompted by a tax or a cap makes no difference — we will all pay more.”
"He proposes a “cap and dividend” system that charges a rising fee on sources of greenhouse-gas emissions (to propel a long-term shift away from such pollution) and returns the revenue to citizens, rich or poor, through a direct payment not unlike the checks that Alaska residents get every year from fees paid to the state by oil companies."
You can read the rest of Revkin's post (not to mention responses to the 'cap and dividend' idea) here: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/paying-the-high-cost-of-climate-control/index.html?hp
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