What is cap and trade all about?

Many of you may have heard of cap and trade as a way to reduce heat-trapping gases and slow down climate change. It's one of the issues that are on the table at Copenhagen, and it's also being discussed in the U.S. senate right now.

So what exactly is cap and trade? Well, an entertaining cartoon called "The Story of Cap and Trade" has been making the rounds in emails and blogs that does a fairly good job of laying out the basics of what a cap and trade bill could look like, but it's definitely far from the full story. David Doniger from the Natural Resources Defense Council has gone into a lot of the details that the cartoon left out and commented on both Paul Krugman's (who won the Nobel Prize in economics and is a columnist at the New York Times) and Jim Hansen's (who is a top climate change scientist at NASA) thoughts on cap and trade. I highly recommend going through these articles and others that are written by experts in the field.

Feel free to add your own thoughts or links to articles on climate change legislation, too!

Climate change can worsen public health

A recent Harvard study found that climate change can increase cases of malaria, lyme disease, respiratory illness, and kidney stones. Higher average temperatures tend to favor mosquitoes and ticks, which are major vectors for malaria and lyme disease, respectively. Heat also increases the formation of photochemical smog, which can increase the risk of asthma and other respiratory diseases. Most importantly, here's something that directly affects Hoosiers:

"Climate change is making Indiana warmer, raising the risk of kidney stones because of low urine volume linked to heat exposure, according to a study cited by the Harvard center. By 2050 southern Indiana will fall into the high-risk zone for kidney stones and by 2100, the entire state will."

All industrialized countries, except the U.S., already have plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It's time for the U.S., which has the largest per capita emissions in the world, to take action so please write to Senators Bayh and Lugar about the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. For more info about the act, check out the Union of Concerned Scientists' website. They have an excellent summary and some good talking points too.