A new politics of climate change for recessionary times.

Let's be clear: No environmental leader worthy of the name is going to stop talking about the climate crisis and pretend this is just about jobs. Obama's Trojan horse is a campaign tactic, not a legislative one. And that's a good thing, because removing climate from the climate debate would be a terrible idea for three reasons. First, if you make energy self-sufficiency your only goal, there's no reason not to embrace the high-carbon "all of the above" solution advocated by people like Gingrich. "I call those people the dirty greens," says Van Jones of Green for All, the most impressive voice in the eco-justice movement. "They say drill, do tar sands and oil shale, turn coal into liquid fuel-whatever! Burn kittens, as long as they're American kittens. Toast the planet!" Second, if you make freedom from expensive fuel your main motivator, then your argument collapses when energy prices drop. And third, given the continued industry opposition to aggressive climate action, it will take the broadest possible coalition to get a climate bill passed, including evangelicals, national-security wonks, green-jobs activists, alt-fuel mavens, green capitalists, the hook-and-bullet crowd, and an army of enviros. Downplaying the climate crisis means squandering the moral message—our duty to future generations—that has galvanized so many. Besides, it wouldn't work. You can put lipstick on a climate bill, but it's still a climate bill.

So, the task is not to somehow disguise the climate crisis or the declining cap on emissions needed to deal with it, but to propel them forward with a message about the economic benefits of climate action. Since climate, energy, and the economy are intertwined, any climate bill will have a profound effect on the economy, and it just makes sense to embrace it. The next president will take office with a list of expensive promises and no money with which to pay for them. As they try to decide which problems to tackle first, both McCain and Obama recognize that a global-warming bill brings with it a built-in revenue stream. The cap-and-trade system that they support could raise $100 billion to $600 billion a year by auctioning some or all of the permits that allow industry to emit CO₂. Some of that money would be spent on energy R&D (that's Obama's 10-year, $150 billion pot of gold), but the next president will have to give most of it back to the people if he wants to pass a climate bill during a recession. It's the best way to resolve the basic cost objections to climate action, and it would help juice the economy while accelerating the transition to a clean energy.

Yes, putting a price on carbon, whether through a tax or cap-and-trade, will drive up household energy costs in the short and medium term before reducing them in the long term, as alternative energy comes on line. Still, receiving an annual check from the climate bill's allowance auctions might persuade some to support it. (Lieberman-Warner devoted $800 billion of its auction proceeds over the next four decades to this sort of energy cost relief. It wasn't nearly enough.) Climate strategist Peter Barnes argues that if the federal government wired them into every American's bank account on a monthly basis (to the tune of, say, $3,000 per household per year), the climate-change bill would becomes the mother of all stimulus packages, the national equivalent of those Alaska dividends that helped make Sarah Palin so popular.

No one should suggest that this money grows on trees. It will come from coal and oil companies, carbon-dependent utilities, and other corporations that buy pollution, and they will surely pass those costs on to customers in the form of higher prices. But according to a University of Massachusetts study, under a cap-and-cash-back plan, most families would come out ahead on the deal. And the more they conserve energy, the more cash they get to keep.

This may not seem like the best moment to argue for the creation of a new market for carbon-do we really want the same bankers who brought us the subprime fiasco to start trading, slicing, and dicing carbon credits? The answer is yes, because without such trading the market is broken. It fails to assign any cost to the global-warming pollution that's being dumped into the skies for free. "Cap-and-trade is a market mechanism, but it's not a free-market mechanism," says Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp. "It's a government-imposed market that remedies a fundamental market flaw. And the idea that markets can be flawed and need a well-thought-out fix is something people may be more receptive to now." Next year, if the new president has the guts to introduce a new climate bill despite the chilly economic winds, it will be time to repair this colossal market failure-while paying people a dividend to make sure the fix doesn't cost too much.