Shellenberger and Nordhaus' analysis is right on point: if global warming were recast as a non-environmental issue, it would rise to the level of the major political challenges of the day -- the Iraq war, the budget deficit, the challenge of nuclear weapons' proliferation, etc.

They are also absolutely correct that it is governments who need to jumpstart the clean energy revolution. My concern is that their suggested implementation of a carbon tax in the US will be too little too late. We are already seeing scientific reports that changes in the climate are taking on their own internal dynamics, with the warming providing its own feedbacks -- independent of the CO2 we put up into the atmosphere.

Any solution needs to be global in scope. Otherwise, anything the US does will be overwhelmed by the coming pulse of carbon from India, China, Mexico, Nigeria, etc. Moreover, a carbon tax will take several years to be implemented and several more to begin to make a real dent in our carbon consumption. We don't have that much time to avert very substantial disruptions.

That's why I have proposed a three-point global strategy which involves:

1) In industrial nations, redirecting the approximately $250 billion in subsidies away from coal and oil and to non-carbon energy sources to create a clean energy infrastructure in the North;

2) creating an international fund of about $300 billion a year for a decade to provide clean energy to developing countries (all of whom would love to go clean energy if it were affordable to them); and

3) instituting within the Kyoto framework a mandatory fossil fuel efficiency standard that rises by 5 percent a year. For the first few years, countries would meet the goal strictly through efficiencies. When they become too expensive, countries would meet their 5 percent per year goal by deploying more and more renewable sources, most of which are 100% efficient according to a fossil fuel standard. And that would create the mass markets and economies of scale that would bring down their prices and make them economically competitive with coal and oil. (For more details, see: "Toward a Real Kyoto Protocol") That would not only maximize the public funding approach, it would also be global in scope.

Break Through is a superb analysis. My only concern is that in navigating the dense and forbidding thicket of political and economic opposition, Shellenberger and Nordhaus place just a bit too much focus on the political challenge -- and, in the process, slightly underestimate the speed and magnitude of the changes taking place in the natural world.

This is a global emergency. Its solution could create millions of jobs, especially in developing countries. It could undermine the economic desperation that gives rise to so much anti-US sentiment. It could begin to turn dependent and impoverished countries into trading partners. And it could jump the renewable energy industry into being a central driving engine of growth of the global economy. Since such a program would transcend alliances and coalitions, it could bring together all the countries on the planet in a common global project -- even in today's profoundly fractured world.

Break Through's greatest contribution, to me, is to remove global warming from the ghetto of environmentalism -- and to place it among the most imminent and far-reaching of all the political challenges facing the world today.

And in this era of anti-government sentiment, it underscores the true value and real mission of governments acting in concert. This is a path toward peace -- peace among people and peace between people and nature. The alternative is a rapid descent into climate hell.

-- Ross Gelbspan (author, The Heat Is On, Boiling Point)