April 5, 2009. We find the media littered with discouraging reports: Unemployment reaches 8.5 percent, 21,000 more troops in Afghanistan, billions to AIG executives, and a drug war on the border. Lurking within the dense murkiness of the economy and foreign affairs is an unexamined, though critical, issue--climate change.

According the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there is a less than 5 percent chance that climate change is caused by natural cycles. A more reasonable explanation, however, leads the panel to estimate up to a 24-inch rise in sea levels during the 21st century. What does 24 inches mean? This seemingly meager amount means massive coastal flooding, tropical cyclones, droughts, and possibly a global water war over the dwindling reserves.

That is, unless we do something about it. Representatives Markey and Waxman, both influential Democrats, have introduced a bill that "will create millions of new clean energy jobs, save consumers hundreds of billions of dollars in energy costs, enhance America’s energy independence, and cut global warming pollution." Cool. But beyond the rhetoric, we discover major problems with the Democratic plan.

First, and most obvious, one of the priorities of the bill is to "ensure a continuing place for coal in our nation’s energy future." The bill proposes new Carbon Capture methods that would use less noxious carbon than coal currently uses; clean coal, so to speak. Only one thing--clean coal doesn’t exist. One of the most upsetting Orwellian oxymorons of our age, according to Yale professor of finance Richard Conniff, "is little more than an advertising slogan." If coal is a significant part of the alternative issue solution, we don’t have a solution, we have a problem.

The bulk of the bill, however, is not devoted to coal. The Waxman-Markey bill’s main proposal is a Cap-and-Trade program to reduce carbon outputs. The premise of Cap-and-Trade is as follows: Carbon output is capped at a certain level, a government agency issues carbon permits to polluting industries, and (hopefully) carbon levels gradually decline as companies adjust to the cap. Sounds great, but in reality, the market works much differently.

According to Michael Dorsey, professor of environmental science at Dartmouth, Cap-and-Trade establishes "the right to pollute, which becomes a commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace." The European Union attempted this market-based solution in 2005, with disastrous results. The EU ended up allotting too many carbon credits, and pollution has not only resisted decline, but it has increased significantly.

Proponents of Cap-and-Trade retort "fine, the EU screwed up, but all we need to do is decrease the amount of credits and we’ll be fine." Once again, this sounds nice, but the argument does not hold water when we examine the ever-tricky facts. When the EU did decrease credits, companies with relatively little carbon output simply traded their credits to the high-pollutant companies, negating any effect.

Eventually this series of trades could lower pollution, but given the distinct urgency of climate change, we should not risk the Earth in a process so patchy. So what is the solution? Well, it’s not pretty, but as always, there is one deceptively obvious one--stop. If government agencies were to impose strong taxes on polluting industries and redirect that windfall into new green technology (instead of bailouts), the United States would be able to quickly repair our slumping climate.

Though I can already hear the pro-corporate shills in Congress whine, industry would not suffer, because the heavy tax lifted off one industry would simply be redistributed into a more palatable one. This sustainable, comprehensive new industry would provide millions of new jobs to Americans. It remains to be seen whether the Waxman-Markey bill will be passed. The prospects are difficult, but we should be hopeful that Congress is making some attempt at mending the almost irreparable climate.

At the same time, it is not cynicism to objectively pick apart the more inconvenient truths of the new legislation and propose something different--a realistic plan based not on the logic of the infinitely expanding markets, but on the compassionate, common sense ideals of everyday Americans. That would be a change.