Three key House Democratic committee chairmen signaled yesterday that they too want to take a swing at the sweeping global warming package that Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) is trying to pass out of committee this week.

Offering perhaps the biggest road block to a floor debate, Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) told reporters that he plans to put President Obama’s health care reform agenda ahead of Waxman’s global warming bill. “We have to deal with health care first,” Rangel said.

Asked for a time frame on the health care legislation, Rangel replied, “As long as it takes.” Rangel later conceded, “Maybe at some point we can do both at the same time. But health being first is a priority.”

The New York Democrat also said he continues to consider a carbon tax to curb greenhouse gas emissions, rather than the cap-and-trade approach that Waxman has been busy marking up since Monday in H.R. 2454 . Several senior members of Rangel’s committee support an outright carbon tax, while others back a different method for distributing emission allowances compared with Waxman’s bill.

“It’s on the table,” Rangel said of the carbon tax. “Of course it is. How can it not be on the table?”

I think a carbon tax may be more politically feasible than we thought a few months ago: On Saturday I heard a member of the House Ways and Means committee say that he believes a majority of his fellow committee members would prefer a carbon tax over the mess that’s being carved up in the name of Cap&Trade.

Of course we can nationalize coal…but why only that? But you can’t “convert them to non-carbon generation by fiat”! You do it with a technology and the only *conversion* that can take place is Gen IV nuclear which is at least a decade away. It’s a technology, not a political, issue.

You’re right, it is a technology issue. If you combine biomass fuel sources with carbon sequestration, it is possible to transfer carbon from the atmosphere, where it causes global warming, and put it into the ground where it does not cause global warming, and generate electricity at the same time.

Lets do a thought experiment:

Suppose you take 1.2 billion tons of biomass, and convert it into 300 million tons of biocarbon. Suppose that 300 million tons of biocarbon is burned in a coal plant converted to carbon capture and storage, and that 300 million tons of carbon ends up stored in geological formations deep in the earth.

Now replant the biomass.

Now do this cycle of replanting, harvesting, and carbon storage every year.

The net result is 300 million tons of carbon being transferred from the air into the ground, every year.

In addition, 300 million tons of carbon from coal are kept out of the air, by doing this.

In addition, useful electricity is generated that can be used to run electric cars, keeping perhaps another 200 million tons of carbon per year out of the air.

In addition, the biomass could come partially from forest thinning and fire protection efforts, keeping perhaps another 100 million tons of carbon out of the atmosphere per year.

So, add it up. What’s the swing, the difference from the status quo?

It adds up to about 900 million tons of carbon per year, kept out of the atmosphere.

Instead of 300 million tons of carbon going into the atmosphere from coal, you end up with 600 million tons of carbon being kept out of the atmosphere – a 900 million ton swing per year, every year.

These carbon negative energy ideas are a way of transferring carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it in the earth, while generating useful electricity.

Why coal? Because coal is almost pure carbon, and all of that carbon ends up in the atmosphere now. Because coal is carbon, not hydrocarbon, no fuel value comes from hydrogen like it does from other fossil fuels like oil and natural gas. All of the energy comes from carbon, and all of that carbon is now dumped into the atmosphere.

Also, we need to move a lot of carbon back underground. So far, nothing on earth has the ability to move carbon from one source to another that the coal fired power plants have.

We just need to reverse the sources and sinks, and transfer carbon out of the biosphere and back underground.

It’s about carbon sources, and carbon sinks.

Think about it.

The extent to which you lose patience with people who hold out hope for a carbon tax is matched by an opposing concern and irritation that to continue to say a tax is unviable is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many people believe that pricing or taxing carbon when it enters the economy and not when it enters the environment is a “cleaner” and more efficient way to control emissions.

I particularly disliked your paragraph saying, in so many words, that if everyone else is playing chess and you’re playing checkers prepare to be criticized and left out. Wow! I can’t disagree with you more here. This sounds like intimidation and bullying. Why shouldn’t Hansen hold true to his beliefs and ideals. All my neighbors drive SUVs and clear their yards and sidewalks with leaf-blowers. They criticize me for using a rake. Ohhh, maybe I should throw it in the bin and pick up a super loud and polluting leaf blower just so I can be in the game (please!)

There are a lot of other points I’d like to make, but I’ll end by encouraging you to review of basic economics. In theory, the potential to reduce carbon emissions is about the same whether one employs a C&T system or a carbon tax as long as the cap is set correctly or the tax or price on carbon is set correctly. In theory, price has a great baring on supply and vice-versa.

[JR: "Intimidation and bullying"? My post is mild stuff compared to Hansen writing that supporters of cap-and-trade are "worshiping at the Temple of Doom."

I don't "lose patience with people who hold out hope for a carbon tax." I lose patience with people who trash cap-and-trade because they think a tax is vastly superior and politically plausible anytime soon.]

Not to just pile on (I will do that anyway), but is the most important part of a product the initial cost? How about if we replace all psychologists with teenagers because they will work cheaper? Maybe there will be consequences in the future with (maybe) fewer people being curied of mental health problems or any of the other things psychologists do being done less well, but it’s the cost that counts, not the consequences.

Doesn’t Hansen have current science and math behind his argument? Doesn’t the experience gained with cap and trade (and now this weakening version of that concept that is being signaled to be acceptable) prove that it doesn’t work? When cap and trade was initially proposed–I believe–by the Dutch in the ’80s, wasn’t cap and trade meant to be a means of transferring the old wealth from the “haves” to the “have nots,” so the “have nots” could skip the dirty stage of development, and the planet, together, could be saved by a new paradigm of wealth: a shift from competition to cooperation to create/sustain wealth (a healthy planet–as far as this relates to homo sapiens)?

That systemic goal of that cap and trade concept (justice) has long been abandoned, in deference to the more “pragmatic” goals of global capitalism, to greed and more “wealth” creation for the “haves.” As I read Geithner’s op-ed in the NYT today, I read in it that the town of DC calls saving the banks: protecting the FDIC from too rapid a run on the government’s credit. Haven’t the large banks been “saved” by government intervention to be bought up and taken over by sovereign and hedge funds to spare the government a run on its credit; its creditability? If so, what has been saved, and for whom? How can a town of such doublespeak be right about climate change mitigation with a political solution” that “makes sense”/”works” in its mindset? Thirty years from now Hansen will, again, be proven to be more right than the current “enlightened right” (though I still argue that, systemically, the central bank controlled, fiat currency system feeding the capitalistic economic model needs to be replaced with currencies coined in carbon credits so that our greed focuses us on being sustainable, rather than hoping to become less greedy so that we somehow become such; Abraham Maslow did not get it right with his hierarchy of needs modeling!).

In any event, a tenacious and doggedly faithful effort to be “right” and get the “right” thing done is an opening for motivated reasoning to get in the way; to leave us lost to a “hope” for a better past.