Last week I blogged on the President’s remarks to the Business Roundtable about why he campaigned on 100% auctioning of CO2 permits: “If you’re giving away carbon permits for free … it doesn’t work.”

A couple of leading mainstream economists who opine on the weather (MEOWs) hissed and pawed at the President because he supposedly made a couple of errors in his remarks, E&E News (subs. reqd) reported Friday night.

The first thing to say is that as The Economist (!) magazine itself labeled economists, “a tribe renowned in the wider world for its desiccated view of human welfare” (see “Voodoo Economists 4: The idiocy of crowds or, rather, the idiocy of (crowded) debates“).

The second thing to know about the question of whether CO2 allowances created by a cap-and-trade bill should be auctioned or allocated (i.e. grandfathered to polluters or given away for free) is that most economists support auctioning off the vast majority of apartments — see, for instance, “Statement by economists supporting 100% auction of carbon permits.”

The third thing to know about the argument for pursuing a CO2 cap-and-trade system is that the case was largely built around the success of such a system for reducing SOx emissions. In particular, the system succeeded in achieving reductions at far lower costs than the the models of the energy sector or conservatives had predicted (see “Wrong Again 1: Business Attacks Climate Security Act“). This was (and is) the centerpiece argument for a cap-and-trade, as I can test from my tenure running the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in the months leading up to the Kyoto protocol.

That was Obama’s point when he said of the system he proposes:

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OK, so I already asked what Climate Progress can do for you (see “What are some questions and issues you want Climate Progress to address?“). And it got a bigger response than I thought it would — 90 comments/suggestions so far (enough to make the top of the Most discussed posts of 2008). I will work to address most of those questions and issues in the coming days weeks.

So now I’m asking suggesting what you can do for Climate Progress: Spread the word!

In the wake of the Tom Friedman column last Sunday calling CP “the indispensable blog,” I had a big (40%) jump in readership (see full stats below).

I’d like to keep the new readers — and expand further. On my end, that means keeping up both the quantity and quality of posts.

On your end, I’m hoping regular CP readers will reach out and try to get me one new reader each, someone that you know is interested in the subject, preferably someone in the persuadable category. Right now, the global warming deniers and their allies are a lost cause (see “Hill conservatives reject all 3 climate strategies and embrace Rush Limbaugh“), and we need to focus on the vast middle.

I’d recommend emailing them the Friedman piece along with my introduction to new readers.

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Last week Obama picked Van Jones to be green jobs adviser. You can read a longer story on whether the position is needed and whether he will be effective in it at the American Prospect, where I’m quoted:

When drafting his charter on green jobs, Jones “has to include the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Transportation, Education, all of them,” says Joseph Romm, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and editor of climateprogress.org.

Jones will be (presumably) charged with ensuring that a green-jobs policy is on every department’s and agency’s agenda, and he has to penetrate the turf-protection culture that exists in these entities to do that. But before he can, he will have to come up with a compendium of policy ideas that are both translatable and custom-fitting to each agency’s structure. “If you really want to provide millions of green jobs, then somebody in the White House has got to be nagging about this at every agency,” Romm said.

I had written last week: Let’s not call this a green jobs czar, as no doubt some will be inclined to do. The president has a great many special assistants and we don’t call them czars. Jones is going to be a special advisor in the White House and that job is hard enough without loading on more expectations.

As you might expect, Jones has thought about this matter and has a better term than my “special advisor,” which he offered in a Greenwire interview excerpted below:

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