July 9, 2009.   Major U.S. policy areas include: (1) The Waxman-Markey cap-trade-etc bill, and its Senate counterpart. (2) Department of Energy subsidies to conservation and research. (3) CAFE fuel-efficiency standards, and (4) An unknown strategy for Copenhagen.

July 9, 2009.   China and India have refused caps. So have developing countries. This leaves half of all emissions without caps. And this half is growing about seven times faster than the industrial half. Carbonomics explained last year that this would happen.

July 9, 2009.   (See U.S. Policy for Waxman bill.) The Good: It sounds certain, and it allows back-room politicking over free permits. The Bad: It can't provide emission certainty and it causes far to much financial uncertainty. This uncertainty, leads to: The Ugly loopholes.

July 9, 2009.   A tax works better economically. But its big advantages are political. A cap is just a sneaky tax anyway, and everyone knows it. And a cap is a volatile tax set by speculators. An untax returns all tax revenues on an equal-per-person basis. You can see it's cheap.

July 9, 2009.   Green jobs, can be better jobs—but not always. Create green jobs in a recession and there are more jobs in total. But in normal times, the Fed controls unemployment, and adding green jobs here takes away regular jobs there.

July 9, 2009.   Originally "smart grid" meant smart transmission lines. Now people mean putting time-of-use meters in homes and such. This will effect total electricity use very little. But we may need is more big dumb transmission lines for wind or eventually solar.

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