Good news!

A great article has been posted on Scientific American about the real costs of carbon and carbon abatement.  It's not as economically crippling as many would have you believe:

If we could achieve a cost of $50 per ton of CO₂, what would that do to energy prices? Every $10 per ton of CO₂ increases the cost of electricity by 1 cent per kilowatt hour, and increases the cost of gasoline by 10 cents per gallon. So a $50 per ton cost to capture CO₂ would, if applied back to the cost of CO₂ emissions, raise electricity prices by 5 cents per kilowatt hour and raise gasoline prices by 50 cents per gallon. That is not a bad price for avoiding catastrophic changes to the planet.

Look at your electric bill.  5 cents in California means about a 20% increase in the electric bill; in the Northwest, it would mean about a 70% increase but the Northwest uses hydropower for over half of its power, and wind is a growing segment of the energy.  $0.50/gallon for gasoline is nothing at this point with how gasoline fluctuates, so I don't see a problem there.

The vision I'm getting from this article is two-fold.  Although renewables are spotty, they could be used to fuel the carbon abatement infrastructure (this is assuming that putting liquid CO₂ in the Earth's crust is a fantastic idea, which I'm not really sure about). So, although renewables are not always timed well for use, combine this with smart-grid demand/supply management, a distributed battery/storage system (plug-in electric cars), and we could really be talking about something cool.

I still think that the amount of land we have available for biofuels is grossly understated, though.  Think of all the lawns, road ditches, and easily-accessed but not typically agricultural places available; one has to be creative in thinking about this, but I do think there is a lot of room for biofuels.

This whole scheme seems fairly logical, though, to me.  I can envision this whole reverse industry that undoes the harm that is used to create energy.  It seems fair to me that when you make a mess, you should have to clean it up.  That is why governments were developed in the first place: to enforce things like that and hold people accountable.  We've recognised carbon as a problem, and a global one at that, so those who make money from emitting carbon should also be the ones to pay for it.  It isn't exorbitant and it isn't punitive; it is just a cost of doing business.  And as long as every energy company has to do it, it is fair: they will all have the same costs of business.  The author has an idea of how to tackle this: I'm not entirely sure it will work because we don't have a global framework in place and the US constantly flouts international consensus in order to race everyone to the bottom and garner itself an unfair competitive advantage when it comes to climate policy.

The best way to go about doing this is to place a price on carbon. Pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it causes long term damage to a planet shared by all, should be something one needs to pay for. The price paid should be at least commensurate to the cost of undoing any harm. On the flip side, efforts that remove a pollutant from the atmosphere should be rewarded at the same rate.

We’ve seen estimates of cost of mature carbon capture systems that range from $35 - $70 / ton, and of the very first systems at around $150 / ton. ...I would propose a price that starts at zero but ratchets up progressively to $100 / ton (in today’s dollars), at an automatic increment of $5 / ton each year. $100 / ton gives buffer room over the current price estimates for carbon capture and storage. This allows for some flexibility if cost estimates turn out to be too low. ...The gradual and predictable increase in the carbon price would soften the immediate economic shock of it, while giving both consumers and corporations clarity about the future and the ability to plan logically for it.

*In America, corporations are legally people, so it applies, dammit.