Breakthrough

The Wall Street Journal's September 12, 2007 story on "cap and trade" vs carbon tax includes a graphic analyzing the cost to Americans of different income levels of a tax on carbon, or an emissions cut of 15 percent. In typical neoclassical (read: market fundamentalist) economic fashion, the Journal only calculates the costs and not the benefits of accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy. I haven't checked these numbers, which come from CBO and American Enterprise, to see if they're right, but here they are:

Here's a couple of other graphs that help tell the story.

While most Americans say they would pay more in energy to support clean energy...

In California last fall, voters rejected a tax on oil production to pay for clean energy:

Hence the need to have a strategy for dealing with global warming that doesn't depend on making energy more expensive.