Megan McArdle contemplates the political challenges to serious carbon emission curbs and speculates about alternative approaches:

We’ve focused on reducing emissions because that seemed like the easiest engineering problem, which may well be true. But the best engineering solution may not be the best economic solution, and it certainly isn’t necessarily the best political solution. It seems like it might be wise to focus more energy on carbon sequestration, which may be technically much more difficult, but is politically worlds easier.

Needless to say, the political difficulties of rigorous emissions curbs aren’t something that people have just noticed. And so a lot of thought and energy and print and pixels have gone into mooting alternative strategies, most famously the Break Through strategy of trying to make clean energy cheap rather than trying to make dirty energy expensive. Megan’s idea is really a sub-set of that larger idea.

And unfortunately, I think the political benefits of that approach are largely illusory. Or, rather, it’s easy enough to say “instead of making dirty energy expensive we’re going to make clean energy cheap” and then pony up $50 million in tax credits for alternative energy. But if you’re assuming we’re talking about doing enough carbon sequestration or cheap solar power or whatever to actually forestall climate catastrophe then you would need to be spending a ton of money. And to raise that ton of money, you’d need a huge tax increase. And guess what’s not very politically feasible? A huge tax increase. After all, this is exactly why curbing carbon emissions via a hefty carbon tax is politically difficult. It’s not that there’s some special difficulty with hefty carbon taxes—any kind of huge tax increases are politically difficult.

Now maybe there’s some reason to think that raising $X from higher income taxes is politically easier than raising $X from a carbon tax. I’m not really sure what the evidence for that is, but maybe it’s true. Here you’re left with the fact that raising $X from carbon taxes for expenditure on sequestration or whatever other subsidy you like is going to be more than twice as effective at reducing carbon than would raising $X from income taxes and spending that money on green technology. The reason is that a carbon tax is, on its own, a de facto subsidy to all kinds of green technology (including sequestration), but since it’s a subsidy that works through market mechanisms rather than political pressure it’s likely to be somewhat more efficiently targeted. But in addition to that, a carbon tax would subsidize conservation.

So while raising $X from carbon taxes and spending that money to “make clean energy cheap” may be more politically difficult than raising $X from income taxes and spending it, I think it’s really beyond plausibility to think that raising $X from carbon taxes would be harder than raising $2X or $3X from income taxes.

Long story short, I just don’t see a better way than either taxing carbon directly, or else indirectly taxing carbon through a cap-and-trade program with auctioned permits. It’s true that if you do what Nordhaus and Shellenberger do and just assume the existence of hundreds of billions of dollars in funds to throw around, then “throwing funds around” looks easier. But given the need to raise whatever money you intend to spend, you might as well raise it by making dirty energy more expensive.

Jeremy Lott nails this:

For example, unpaid Bush shill Fred Barnes recently wrote “for the editors” of the Weekly Standard that “Bush had 10 great achievements (and maybe more) in his eight years in the White House.” Among his undisputed successes on the foreign policy front were “enhanced interrogation of terrorists”, “the rebuilding of presidential authority” and “the surge”.

That an organ of conservative opinion would tout Bush’s moves toward torture and autocracy should be shocking. Notably absent from Barnes’s list was Bush’s decision to launch the invasion of Iraq in the first place, so the best that one of Bush’s most ardent defenders can say is that Bush managed to partially ameliorate one of his worst calls. That should change hearts and minds all right.

The vast majority of the country hates Bush, as is appropriate, but a substantial majority seems to have undergone a hideous moral and intellectual transformation into Bush’s image.

I’m watching the proceedings from my couch. High definition television offers a much better view than what I could possibly have gotten standing on the mall. And I’ll admit that the festivities this whole weekend have actually left me feeling a bit curmudgeonly—I don’t like the monarchical qualities and I don’t like the way the need to strike a tone of unity and bipartisanship is making it impossible to talk in a serious way about the challenges facing the country.

But as the moment approaches that sentiment is tending to melt away. Still, though I’m happy today I think I’ll be happier tomorrow when we can all get on with things.

Some new appointees for the Office of Management and Budget including CAP Senior Fellow Robert Gordon:

Jeffrey Liebman, now Malcolm Wiener professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, will be executive associate director of the Office of Management and Budget. Robert Gordon, policy director for Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004, will be associate director for education, income maintenance, and labor. And Xavier de Souza Briggs, associate professor of sociology and urban planning at MIT, will be associate director for general government programs. (Their biographies, provided by Obama’s transition office, are below.)

Liebman has written against “carve-outs” of private accounts from the existing Social Security system but in favor of add-on accounts. Don’t know anything about de Souza Briggs.

Gordon is awesome. I especially recommend these articles on teacher certification, crime, and conservative myths about the Community Reinvestment Act.

But beyond these qualities, he has the to help Peter Orszag build a true Team of Bloggers at the OMB. Not only did Orszag run the top public sector blog back during his days as CBO Director, but Robert’s been an important member of CAPAF’s Wonk Room team as well as an occasional contributor to TNR‘s blogs. You can see his Wonk Room posts here. I think there hasn’t been official word on whether or not there will be an OMB blog (OMBBLOG), but I’m really hoping to see one.

Via ThinkProgress, John Podesta makes the case for letting Barack Obama keep his Blackberry.

It seems that Fiat may get 35 percent of Chrysler in exchange “for covering the cost of retooling a Chrysler plant to produce one or more Fiat models to be sold in the U.S.” Given that it seems almost nobody wants to buy any car of any sort, it’s a bit hard to know why Fiat thinks this is a good time to start up a North American operation. On the other hand, Chrysler seems to be just about giving equity away at this point. And I think the Italian government in more generous with its bailouts of national champions than we are.