Bill McKibben on [Splitting Up Some of the Climate Scam Money]

The question becomes what you do with all that money that you just made off this auction of the permits. The utilities would like you to basically give the permits to them for free. That's ridiculous. Congress would pretty much like to take the money and spend it on something, windmills in my state, or whatever. Personally, I think that for most part that is a harder argument to make, given the things Congress has spent money on in the recent past. Corn-based ethanol being exhibit A.

So the soundest proposal, probably, is to take that money, and write a check to everybody in the country every six months... Here's your climate check. Your share of the sky. Just the way that Alaska writes everybody a check every year for their share of oil revenues in the state. So, you know, I am still getting the price at the pump to clean up my act, and I am being made whole, more or less. It's not a perfect system, but if you game it out politically, it is probably the best chance we have.

e360: Do you think this idea is gaining any kind of traction in Washington?

McKibben: I do. Obama has talked about it some. I think it's probably the fallback if Waxman/Markey [a House climate bill] runs on to the shoals.

Green meets reality in Aspen

Still, [Auden Schendler's] rhetoric can be preachy, and his logic somewhat tortured. He attempts to put distance between contemporary climate crusaders and environmental crusaders of the 1970s. He poo-poos the environmentalism of "a secular religion." Then, without a hint of irony, he argues that climate change offers "the opportunity to participate in a movement that - in its vastness of scope - can fulfill the human need of a sense of meaning in our lives."

More puzzling, he admits that the greenhouse gas emissions of the Aspen Skiing Co. have actually grown during his time there. The cause, he says, is the increasing volume of business but also the increasing energy intensity of the business. That one sentence shrieked for more thoughtful reflection and analysis than it got, perhaps displacing some of the call to arms.

Climate Progress » Blog Archive » How to allocate one trillion dollars in climate scam money?

[E&E Daily (Subs. Req’d)] Waxman and Markey have won praise from some committee Democrats for avoiding a take-it-or-leave-it scenario on the emission allocations, which likely will be worth more than a trillion dollars over the multi-decade lifetime of the environmental program.