Our guest blogger is Peter Altman, Climate Campaign Director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Over the last several months, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been holding “State Climate Dialogues” around the country, ostensibly to “stimulate a national discussion on key climate change issues.” These are much more monologue than dialogue though, and the punchline is pretty consistently a prediction of economic disaster if the Congress creates a serious climate policy.

If the Chamber’s Chicken Littles stay on message, anyone attending today’s event in Detroit, Michigan is likely to hear the same old message. But many experts disagree with this view of gloom and doom.

For instance, Dr. Martin Kushler, director of the Utilities Program at the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, says:

The claim that taking steps to address climate change would be bad for the economy is simply not true. We know from proven experience that we can save electricity through energy efficiency programs at one-third the cost of a new power plant. With a strong energy efficiency policy we can save money and reduce carbon emissions at the same time.

Dr. Andrew Hoffman, associate professor of management & organizations, associate professor of natural resources and associate director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, University of Michigan, said:

Think of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions as a market shift, one driven by regulations at the city, state, national and international levels. But one also driven by consumer, investor, insurance and energy markets. Any company executive who ignores these shifts does so at their peril.

This week’s event in Detroit is just the latest stop in the Chamber of Commerce’s Chicken Little Roadshow to gin up worries about efforts to solve our energy and climate problems. Speakers at these events rely on questionable assumptions and even more questionable results to make their case. Read more

Today, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson appeared before the House Financial Services Committee — alongside Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair — to explain his implementation of the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP).

During the hearing, Congress voiced its displeasure with Paulson. Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) told Paulson, “you seem to be flying a $700 billion plane by the seat of your pants.” Both Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) chastised Paulson for not providing aid to homeowners, even though he could under the TARP legislation. Watch a compilation:

Paulson defended himself by saying, “The purpose of the financial rescue legislation was to stabilize our financial system and to strengthen it. It is not a panacea for all our economic difficulties.” But the TARP legislation does have clear language allowing the Treasury to facilitate home loan modification; Paulson has just shown no inclination to do so.

Underscoring the extent of the housing crisis, currently “one in 11 mortgages is delinquent or in foreclosure”:

In the second quarter of 2008, the share of mortgages that were delinquent reached 6.4%, and the share of mortgages that were in foreclosure hit 2.7%. The share of new mortgages going into foreclosure continues to new record highs, with 1.1% in the second quarter.

In her testimony, Bair said that “more than 4.4 million non-GSE mortgages are estimated to become delinquent” by the end of 2009. Paulson, though, has proposed buying up just about everything but mortgages, including credit card debt. But as Andrew Jakabovics explained, “it is certainly questionable to promote increased lending for credit cards. Outstanding revolving consumer debt is approaching a trillion dollars. Encouraging further household indebtedness is hardly responsible.”

Bair has put forth a plan that — for $24.4. billion — could prevent 1.5 million foreclosures, which Bernanke called a “very promising approach.” If Paulson would come around as well, then some of the bailout funds might actually be directed at the root cause of the financial crisis.

During his unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee was a vocal supporter of the fair tax, a plan which would abolish the Internal Revenue Service and replace the federal income tax and most other federal taxes with a 30 percent sales tax.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Huckabee was in Georgia last weekend to support Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), another fair tax advocate, who is headed into a December 2nd run-off election with challenger Jim Martin. Huckabee “joined about 2,000 people Sunday afternoon at the Gwinnett Civic Center in what became not just a fair-tax rally, but a major campaign stop”:

“This race is our best chance to keep the fires burning for the fair tax,” said Huckabee. “And we are not going to squander this opportunity.”

However, as Matthew Yglesias has documented, even conservatives think that the fair tax is a crazy idea. In The New Republic, Jonathan Chait explained why the plan is unworkable:

Tax experts believe that a sales tax above around 10 percent is impossible to enforce because the incentives for cheating are so great. The fair tax would impose a 30 percent sales tax–so high that it would no doubt begin a cycle of black-market sales, resulting in escalating rates to capture the lost revenue, resulting in even more cheating, to the point of total collapse.

Even if the system was sustainable, as Megan McArdle pointed out “It will end up being quite regressive, with the highest effective burden falling on the lower tiers of the middle class.”

The American tax code is, admittedly, a mess, and one that actively encourages income disparity. However, enacting a cockamamie scheme that entirely scraps the current system would just make matters worse. Instead — as explained in Change for America — the U.S. needs to find its way back to a more progressive tax code that helps build “a sustainable, inclusive economy that benefits all.”