“Obama needs to pass in 2009 the mother of all energy bills.” In the yours-in-the-struggle but generally excellent Salon, see “Real Science Comes to Washington“, by Joseph Romm, Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Romm is author of Hell and High Water: Global Warming–The Solution and the Politics.
Obama must begin high-level bilateral negotiations with China (or trilateral negotiations that include the European Union) to get a national commitment from the world’s biggest carbon dioxide emitter to cap their emissions no later than 2020. Such a deal would presumably be contingent on U.S. action, but would enable a much stronger domestic climate bill.
We simply can’t solve the climate problem without Chinese action. And absent Chinese action in the next decade, the developed countries could never sustain the price for carbon dioxide needed to achieve meaningful reductions.