Close your eyes and imagine yourself at your favorite beach. Swells rise around your tanned hips. A bottle of beer and a joint are held safe and dry above your head. You’re sporting a revealing little bathing suit over a younger version of your hot self, airbrushed to perfection using the power of imagination. And there are no cops around to spoil the fun.

Now imagine what that beach would look like if the water was 15 feet higher. Your beer and your ganja are now full of saltwater, and you’re struggling just to keep your head above the waves. Unless your favorite beach is at the bottom of a cliff, nearby buildings are under water, taken over by invasive communities of pineapple-dwelling, square pants-wearing sponges.

That’s not some outrageous scenario dreamed up by liberal scientists with global warming agendas. (The sponge bit was admittedly outrageous, but you can blame me, not the scientists, for it.) No, it’s where sea levels were 120,000 years ago: 15 feet higher than they are today.

Fast forward to 20,000 years ago, when the world was nearing the end of an ice age. Vast stretches of today’s oceans were ice cubes, and as a result, sea levels were 400 feet lower than they are today. What now are tropical near-shore islands back then were frigid hills.

The seas rose again between 20,000 and 6,000 years ago. Then they started rising again early in the 19th century. (Whatever else was happening during the early 19th century, hmmm? A little polluting something called the Industrial Revolution, perhaps?) The seas have been rising ever since, and as a result, land is losing territory to the seas, which are eight inches higher now than they were in 1870.

Scientists can’t be sure how quickly or how badly the world is going to flood, but they have published a variety of estimates based on the amount of pollution we pump into the atmosphere in the coming years. All the scenarios are pretty apocalyptic, though we’ve factored out the possibility if sudden ice cap collapse, which would create an even more dramatic deluge. So what the hell: Have a little fun on the way down and choose your own adventure!

Adventure No. 1 If you decide to quickly switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy …

Adventure No. 2 If you decide to gradually switch to renewable energy …

Adventure No. 3 If you decide to go with the flow and accept the status quo …

Continue the way we’ve been going, and we could see an increase in global temperatures of 10 degrees F by the end of the century, resulting in 55 inches or more of sea-level rise, according to models used by the National Research Council. To see what your city would look like under that much water, head over to NOAA’s website and use their nifty mapping tool.Here’s a map of what San Francisco would look like:

Piers all around the city and low-lying coastal roads are under water. Treasure Island and the Port of Oakland are largely inundated. And not shown on this map: Because nearly half of California’s rain and snowmelt eventually drains into San Francisco Bay, inland storms and melting snows would lead to regular flash flooding throughout the region.

And here’s Boston:

All of the city’s coastal neighborhoods and the harbor islands would flood, as would most of Fort Point. Storms such as Sandy would lead to deep flooding at Quincy Market, the New England Aquarium, and scores of other landmarks.

And that’s just the beginning. In this adventure, the seas just keep on rising.

Adventure No. 4 If you decide to burn, burn, burn until all the glaciers and ice caps melt …

Ever wonder about the future of energy? Will it be wind? Solar? Geothermal? No wait, I got it, tar sands! (Let’s try that again — tar sands!) They’ve got everything oil does, but they’re harder to get, crappier when you get them, and leave a much bigger mark on the climate. Sounds like a winner. Let’s look a little closer, shall we?

First off, what are tar sands? Tar sands are deposits of about 90 percent sand or sandstone, water, and clay mixed with only about 10 percent high-sulfur bitumen, a viscous black petroleum sludge rich in hydrocarbons, also known as “natural asphalt.”

The Athabasca reserves, in Alberta, Canada, estimated to hold about 170 billion barrels, are the site of the only commercial tar-sands operation in the world. (Though, spoiler alert, that’s about to change.) It’s one of the largest industrial programs on the planet and could eventually cover an area larger than the state of Florida — and it’s sprouting an enormous oily ganglion known as the Keystone XL pipeline, which, if completed, would pump 1.1 million barrels of bitumen sludge a day, crisscrossing much of the continent’s freshwater supply, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

Sound like a complicated way to create oil, gasoline, and diesel? Naw. Ain’t no thing. Just follow these simple instructions:

1. Change the name from tar sands to oil sands. Even though there’s no actual oil in them, you’re already that much closer to that sweet Texas Tea. I mean, tar is the reason we don’t have mastodons. Nobody wants tar. But everybody wants oil — we put it in our cars and on our salads!

2. Clear-cut all that unsightly boreal forest. This, admittedly, can be a bit of a bear — or, more likely, lots of bears, and lynxes, and trees, and anything else that creeps, crawls, grows, or flies, and, in the name of tar sands, will also need to die.

3. Get yourself some massive excavators, the biggest moveable objects on the planet, each capable of gouging out 16,000 cubic meters of earth an hour, and set about ripping pits into the planet 15 stories deep. Use the excavators to fill enormous dump trucks, 22 feet high and nearly 50 feet long, and capable of hauling 400 tons a load — which is good, because we’re far from done, and it takes a lot of sand to make a little oil.

4. To extract the bitumen from the sands, you’ll need to crush the sands with enormous machines creatively known as crushers. Mix the crushed sands with hot water to form a slurry, then agitate the slurry (interestingly, also a major step in most British cooking) so the bitumen sludge can be scooped out. The stuff is still too thick to transport, though, so you’ll need to cut it with solvents so it can be shipped via pipeline for processing.

5. Now you’re ready to get started! Of course you’ve got a problem. Somebody added solvents to our tar, so here comes the hydro-treating that removes the solvents, along with as much nitrogen, sulfur, and other metals as we can get out. The process uses a lot of water and energy in the form of natural gas and oil. (Hey, what are we trying to make again?) Next, heat it again to remove carbon and add hydrogen as part of the upgrading process to make this sludge useful.

6. The bitumen still needs to be refined, so it’s off again into another pipeline to an oil refinery, though most of the old refineries aren’t up to the task of handling the filthy bitumen, so you’ll need to build new refineries or upgrade old ones. Presto! You’re cooking with gas!

After all of this, it takes as much as four tons of sand and four barrels of fresh water to make a barrel of synthetic oil, which is good for about 42 gallons of gas, or one fill up in a ’97 Suburban. The good news is about 10 percent of that water is recycled! (On the downside, the other 90 percent is dumped into toxic tailing ponds, which currently cover about 50 square kilometers [19 square miles] along the Athabasca River, and is leaking into the ecosystem at a rate of perhaps 11 million liters a day.)

Sounds great, huh? That’s probably why the state of Utah has given final approval to open the world’s second commercial tar-sands project. The Alberta operation uses more water than a city of a million people each year. Seems like a perfect fit for Utah. I’m sure the 2 million-plus people in the greater Salt Lake City area will switch to (caffeine-free) Pepsi!

Not everyone seems quite as enthused as Utah, however. The E.U. attempted to single out tar sands as “highly polluting,” and Simon Hughes, the deputy leader of the British Liberal Dems, compared them to land mines, blood diamonds, and cluster bombs. This side of the pond, James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Space Studies Institute, warned that exploiting all of Canada’s tar sands would be the final nail in the climate coffin, and that heading down that road will lead to a global game over.

But what do those guys know? Just follow the steps and making oil out of tar sands is as easy as falling out of bed. And besides, tar sands isn’t game over, it’s a new beginning.

You learned it in preschool, and now it’s back in a more grown-up way. From cars to kids’ clothes to cold hard cash, sharing is caring more than ever before. The sharing economy builds and leverages social bonds, creates a more democratic marketplace, reduces the sheer amount of stuff we need to buy, and creates more resilient communities in the process. It’s the bastard child of market disruption that began on the web decades ago (Napster, anyone?), but it’s a child with a conscience.

The kind of “collaborative consumption” we see in services like Zipcar and Airbnb has the potential to revolutionize the way we live our lives. But it’s not all bartered canning equipment and blissful couchsurfing, folks — the sharing economy is a serious moneymaker for individuals and companies who “share” their stuff for a price. Investors, who prefer the wonktastic phrase “underused asset utilization” to “sharing economy,” say the market amounts to $100 billion to $500 billion worldwide, and it’s growing fast.

Here’s a breakdown of the various sharing philosophies, a few of the reasons that sharing is blowing up right now, and some ways that you can get in on the action. Just drag your pointer over the pictures for more info.

By now, you know that not all meat is created equal. That familiar fable about Old MacDonald and his happy barnyard menagerie is a far cry from the cruel reality of factory farms, where cows, pigs, and chickens are crammed together in giant warehouses, fattened on grain, and pumped full of antibiotics, then rolled out to the slaughterhouse to become the next Big Mac or box of McNuggets.

In regulatory lingo, these meat factories are called “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs. (Pronounced “cay-fo.”) Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about them — and a few things you’d probably rather not know.

Q. What makes a CAFO a CAFO?

A. Most in the industry consider all factory farms CAFOs, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a very specific meaning. According to the EPA, an Animal Feeding Operation (AFO) is an operation that confines animals for over 45 days in a vegetation-free area. These animals are packed into warehouses and lots with slatted floors, not wandering around in the grass. Here’s the EPA’s website: “AFOs congregate animals, feed, manure and urine, dead animals, and production operations on a small land area. Feed is brought to the animals rather than the animals grazing or otherwise seeking feed in pastures, fields, or on rangeland.”

CAFOs are essentially big AFOs. The EPA breaks CAFOs down [PDF] into large, medium, or small varieties, depending on the number of animals involved, how wastewater and/or manure are managed, and whether the operation is “a significant contributor of pollutants.” Large CAFOs, which have at least 1,000 cows or 30,000 hens, are automatically subject to government oversight.

Here’s what one of those looks like:

Photo by Shutterstock.

Q. How much of the meat we eat is CAFO-raised?

A. It’s hard to say exactly. Despite their growing presence in this country, CAFOs are invisible to most of us. If you live in an urban or suburban part of the country, most livestock — save the occasional decorative cow or sheep — is kept out of sight. But if you’ve driven through California on Interstate 5, you may have seen and smelled the giant feedlot known as Cowschwitz. There are CAFOs in just about every state, but the Southeast and the Midwest — Iowa has an especially high number — are where you’ll find them in the highest concentration.

In case you missed it, it looks like this:

Photo by istock.

The exact number of CAFOs in this country is not easy to pin down. In its 2008 report, CAFOs Uncovered, the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote, “Although they comprise only about 5 percent of all U.S. animal operations, CAFOs now produce more than 50 percent of our food animals.” That was four years ago, and there is evidence that the number of CAFOs — especially in the Midwest — has gone up since then.

Q. Isn’t it more efficient to raise meat like this?

A. It’s true that CAFOs crank out a whole lot of cheap meat in the short run, but there are long-term environmental costs associated with these operations that don’t show up on the price tag in the supermarket. Many CAFOs are located in arid areas, where large quantities of groundwater are required (like in the case of several large dairy producers in New Mexico). CAFOs also pollute the air and waterways with toxic feces and urine.

Q. Ooh, did somebody say “toxic feces”?

A. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, CAFOs produce about 65 percent of our country’s manure, or about 300 million tons per year — that’s double the amount of poo generated by all the people in the U.S.

Here’s what that looks like:

A CAFO manure lagoon. (Photo by Jeff Vanugam.)

Some of that poo gets spread over farm fields, kinda like the old days, and some gets turned into energy through something called methane digestion. But a great deal of it ends up in holding areas, or lagoons, like the one pictured above. The result is often toxic fumes and high-nutrient (not in a good way) waste that leaks into streams and well water. The EPA reports that CAFO waste has polluted over 35,000 miles of river and groundwater in 17 states.

Q. Why do CAFO owners use so many antibiotics?

A. The kind of extreme crowding that happens in CAFOs puts animals under a lot of stress. It can make some of them aggressive (you might be too, if you were locked in the mosh pit with a bunch of overweight metal heads), and it also makes many of them sick. CAFO owners use routine, sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics to both prevent disease and make animals grow faster. In fact, a frightening 80 percent of the antibiotics used in this country go to “treat” animals.

Overuse has also led to antibiotic-resistant bacteria in meat, and — perhaps even scarier — a growing concern that the antibiotics we give humans won’t work for long (Read a report from the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production [PDF]).

Q. Surely regulations make this stuff safe for people and the environment, right?

A. Only the largest CAFOs are subject to special federal government oversight. Beyond that, the rules vary state by state.

Of course, there are regulations governing farms — but most of them were designed for something that looks a little more like Old MacDonald’s place, and by calling themselves farms, many CAFOs have escaped the regulations associated with big factories. As Daniel Imhoff, editor of the 2010 CAFO Reader, said in a 2010 Grist interview: “If the CAFO is legally considered a farm, or an agricultural enterprise, rather than an industry, then it is exempt from regulation of its airborne and land-borne waste. The industry has been fighting for many years to retain this agricultural status.”

But does this look like a farm to you?

Photo by Shutterstock.

[Ed's note: OK, this is a scene from a slaughterhouse, not the CAFO itself, but you get the idea.]

CAFO owners have done their damndest to keep their operations from public and government scrutiny. Their latest ploy is something called the “Farmer’s Privacy Act of 2012,” a bill, recently introduced in Congress, that would prevent the EPA from being able to fly over CAFOs.

Q. What about the people who work at these factories?

Working conditions in CAFOs are among the worst around. Not only are wages low and hours long, but these facilities — which are full of dust, ammonia, and endotoxins (toxins released by bacteria) — are also very hard on workers’ respiratory systems. They are also rife with viruses that can pass from animals to humans.

Q. How do I know if meat I buy in the grocery store is from a CAFO?

A. Easy — if you look really close …

Photo by Shutterstock.

You don’t see it? Ah, right. That’s because meat from animals raised in CAFOs looks a lot like any other — and it isn’t labeled. In fact, the onus remains on the relatively small percent of meat-producers who are trying to do something else — whether it’s use organic feed, raise their animals in smaller numbers, or keep them on pasture — to make their practices known through labels that are often perceived as something extra.

“I just want normal meat,” you may think to yourself, when faced with labels that declare things like “grass-fed,” “grass-finished,” and “pasture-raised.” Well, these days, we can all pretty much assume that “normal meat” = CAFO meat.

Q. So, how do I avoid CAFO meat?

A. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

* Find a farm in your area that raises animals on pasture (a farmers market is a great place to start the hunt).

* Be willing to spend a little more and eat a little less. You may also want to experiment with less-popular cuts, buy ground meat, and make your own stock from bones.

* Before ordering meat at a restaurant, ask if they know where it came from. If they don’t, it’s a safe bet it came from a CAFO.

“Fracking”: It sounds more like a comic-book exclamation (kapow! boom! frack!) than a controversial method for extracting natural gas and oil from rock deep underground. By turns demonized as a catastrophic environmental threat and glorified as a therapy for our foreign oil addiction, fracking has become a flashpoint in our national energy policy.

First developed in the 1940s, fracking — literally, “hydraulic fracturing,” or “smashing rock open with lots of water” — only began to boom around 2005, but today, it’s used in nine out of every 10 natural gas wells in the U.S. As many as 35,000 wells are fracked each year [PDF], according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). And shale gas (often fracked) now accounts for 15 percent of total U.S. natural gas production, up from virtually nil a few years ago.

Scientists assure us that fracking can be done safely — at least in theory. They are still working to understand the long-term implications of using this technology at large scale in the real world, however, where things spill, accidents happen, and people have their health, homes, schools, airports, groundwater, and even cemeteries to worry about.

We know scientists aren’t the only ones looking for answers. So below, we tackle six key questions about fracking.

1. How does fracking work?

Hydraulic fracturing involves cracking rock formations by pumping fluid into wells at high pressure, forcing oil or gas out of the rock. It’s also known as hydrofracking and fracing, and, most commonly, fracking (not to be confused with the colorful suggestions of autocorrect programs, “franking” or “freaking”).

Click to embiggen.

Done right, fracking can squeeze natural gas from layers of rock that would otherwise be too difficult or costly to exploit. Often this rock is a very tight, clay-rich, sedimentary mud stone known as shale — for example, the Marcellus Shale formation in New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Maryland; the Bakken Shale in North Dakota; and the Barnett Shale in Texas. Drillers also use fracking to release gas from fine-grained sands known as tight sands, and to free methane from coal beds.

It takes more than a garden hose to get this job done. Frackers pump up to 4 million gallons [PDF] of fluid as far as 10,000 feet below ground at up to 4,200 gallons per minute. The pressurized fluid creates tiny cracks, or fissures, in the shale around a borehole far below ground level. Gas flows out of the rock and up to the surface.

The wells’ L shape, enabled by advances in “horizontal drilling” over the last decade, makes it possible to tap many small pockets of gas scattered across wide, thin rock layers. Horizontal drilling, combined with fracking, makes it worthwhile for companies to tap gas stores that just wouldn’t have been economical a few years back. And none too soon, since we’ve already harvested [PDF] much of the low-hanging fruit (read: the big, easily tapped gas deposits).

2. What’s in that fluid?

There are three basic ingredients in fracking fluids:

• Water: An Olympic-size swimming pool holds about 660,000 gallons of water, and a single fracking well can use seven or eight times that amount. Energy companies often buy water from farmers, lease surplus water from municipalities, or buy treated wastewater.

• Sand: Grains of sand, acting as “proppants,” keep cracks in the shale open so gas can flow out of the rock and up the well. In place of sand, some drillers use ceramic pellets or other particles.

• Chemicals: A chemical cocktail of “additives,” in industry speak, helps to dissolve minerals, reduce friction, prevent corrosion, thicken the fluid (so it can transport the sand), clean out debris, prevent clay from swelling, and fight bacteria, among other jobs.

At various stages, the list of chemical ingredients may include hydrochloric acid, petroleum distillates, ammonium persulfate, calcium chloride, boric acid, citric acid, borate salts, and many more additives. Exposure to high amounts of some common frack-fluid chemicals, like ethylene glycol (a key antifreeze ingredient), have been linked to serious health problems, such as kidney, heart, and nervous-system damage. Others, like sodium chloride (table salt) and guar gum (a common food thickener derived from beans) are generally benign.

3. Do those chemicals get into drinking water?

Maybe you’ve seen this startling scene from the Oscar-nominated film GasLand:

As it turns out, the faucet here was spewing naturally occurring methane, which is difficult to attribute to fracking in a direct, conclusive way. Nonetheless, people’s concern that fracking can taint our drinking water with unsavory and possibly dangerous elements is not unfounded.

A study published in May 2011 in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found a link between methane in drinking water supplies and proximity to shale gas drilling. Seven months later, the EPA said for the first time that chemicals used in fracking had been found in drinking water in Pavillion, Wyo., home to hundreds of natural gas wells. And in July 2012, the U.S. EPA said its tests of wells around Dimock, Penn., had revealed barium, arsenic, or manganese at levels high enough to present health concerns in the water supplies of five households.

Remember, fracking involves millions of gallons of fluid for each well. That fluid must be transported via pipelines or trucks and stored in tanks or ponds prior to injection into the well. There are lots of opportunities for spillage (of the wastewater, as well as fracking chemicals like hydrochloric acid). Shoddy well casings can allow gas to leak out of the well and into water aquifers. Equipment failures and well blowouts can send wastewater flowing into nearby creeks.

Anywhere from 30 to 70 percent of the original fluid volume [PDF] doesn’t come back out of the well right away. It remains “stranded” underground for years. The wastewater that does bubble to the surface, which can now contain salts, minerals, and low-level radioactive materials leached out of the soil and rock, must be recycled or disposed of. Most frequently, this water is injected back into the earth, though it is sometimes pumped to ill-equipped municipal sewage plants — which can be bad news for rivers. (The EPA is now working on standards for shale gas wastewater treatment and disposal.)

4. Does fracking cause earthquakes?

It can. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), fracking “causes small earthquakes, but they are almost always too small to be a safety concern.”

Of course, residents near fracking sites may have a different standard for “concern.” Just ask around Lancashire, in the U.K., where two small earthquakes registering 2.3 and 1.4 on the Richter scale in 2011 have been linked to fracking. According to the International Energy Agency [PDF], fractures in this instance just so happened “to intersect, and reactivate, an existing fault.”

Re-injecting wastewater into fracking wells can also cause earthquakes that are “large enough to be felt and may cause damage,” according to the USGS. Scientists have fingered wastewater injection as the culprit behind quakes last Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve (magnitude 2.7 and 4.0, respectively) in Youngstown, Ohio, which didn’t used to be earthquake country.

5. Is there an environmental upside to fracking?

Original photo by Ari Moore.

Perhaps. Fracking helped produce so much natural gas that a supply glut drove gas prices down to a 10-year low in the winter of 2011-2012, according to the EIA, and that has made it more competitive with other fuels. That’s good news if you consider that natural gas does burn cleaner than either coal or oil. It produces less carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and less sulfur dioxide, a component of acid rain and an air pollutant linked to respiratory problems including asthma and emphysema. In fact, when lower gas prices made the fuel more competitive with coal for electricity this year, it helped the U.S. reduce its overall greenhouse gas emissions.

But when you look at the whole natural gas package, from production through use and waste disposal, it’s clear that natural gas exacts a steep environmental toll — particularly when it’s fracked. In addition to the amount of water involved, and the huge quantities of chemical-containing wastewater, there is air pollution from heavy machinery at the drill sites and hydrocarbons released by the wells, which scientists are just beginning to investigate.

In Garfield County, Colo., preliminary research out of the Colorado School of Public Health suggests residents living within half a mile of natural gas drilling sites are exposed to higher levels of air pollutants, including benzene and xylene, than folks living farther way.

Other studies suggest that if methane, a principal component of natural gas, leaks during drilling, transport, or fueling, it can cancel out the greenhouse gas emission benefits of burning natural gas instead of gasoline in cars. It doesn’t take much, because methane is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

6. Can anything be done to stop the fracking boom?

Photo by Not An Alternative.

Internationally, fracking has encountered stiff opposition over water pollution and other environmental concerns. Bulgaria and France have banned the practice, the United Kingdom and Romania have suspended it, and still more countries in Europe are considering the moratorium route. South Africa slammed the brakes on shale gas exploration in 2011, but it lifted its moratorium on fracking in September 2012.

Here in the States, the practice has met resistance on the local level from groups concerned about possible (and still poorly understood) consequences for health, rural landscapes, ecosystems, and the final resting places of veterans. New York residents living near the northern border of the Marcellus Shale and within the Utica Shale region have been especially vocal in opposing fracking. More than 130 municipalities in New York State have enacted moratoriums or banned fracking outright. Pittsburgh banned natural gas drilling in 2010, becoming the first city in shale gas-rich Pennsylvania to do so.

So far, however, the winners in this fight are those who benefit from squeezing cash — er, gas — from shale. That includes not only energy producers but also landowners who lease surface or mineral rights and state and local governments that make millions in tax revenue. The boom has also made a good talking point for politicians touting their contributions to national energy independence. And it’s one more sign that we’re hell bent on getting every ounce of fossil fuel the earth has to offer, never mind the long-term risks.

In 2000, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen suggested that humans have had such profound and far-reaching impacts on the planet that we have ushered in a new geologic age – the Age of Man, or, as Crutzen called it, the Anthropocene. The idea has been bouncing around the halls of academia ever since, and in the last few years, it has jumped from the ivory tower into popular literature and a few geek-tastic conversations over beer. The notion that humans now run this joint seems to have struck a chord.

Just getting up to speed? The team from the Generation Anthropocene podcast at Stanford University sat down in the recording studio and tried to explain everything in five short minutes. (It ended up taking seven, but who’s counting?) Just for fun, they did it game-show style. Here they are talking about the basics of the Anthropocene, the arguments for and against adding it to the official geologic timetable, and why the idea is so catchy:

Also:

• Grist’s David Roberts explains why the Anthropocene is so hard for people to get their heads around and links to a cool video.
• If you really want to dive deep, the Royal Society dedicated an entire issue of its Philosophical Transections to the Anthropocene.
• Find Generation Anthropocene’s interviews about our new age on Grist, or go straight to the source.

“Carbon tax”: There’s something in that term for everyone to hate. For lefties and climate hawks, carbon — as in carbon dioxide, the largest contributor to climate change — is public enemy No. 1. And we all know what folks on the right think of taxes.

Yet the notion of creating a carbon tax in the U.S. refuses to die — maybe because it’s a creative idea that also holds some appeal across the ideological spectrum. It’s a practical scheme to alleviate global warming — and it’s market-based!

Here are some answers to the carbon-tax questions we know you have.

Q. What the heck is a carbon tax?

A. Simple: It’s a tax on carbon dioxide (CO2) huffed into the atmosphere when we burn coal, oil, natural gas, gasoline, and any other carbon-based fuel. CO2 is the biggest contributor to climate change, and putting a tax on it is one way to encourage people to spew a little less of it.

There are different ways to structure these taxes, but the generally accepted method is to collect them at the source: The coal company or the oil company pays based on the amount of CO2 their product will create.

The idea has been slow to catch on (what about our response to climate change hasn’t?). But there are currently carbon taxes in Sweden, Canada, Boulder, Colo., San Francisco, and other foreign lands. (The Carbon Tax Center has a full rundown.) And there’s been talk recently of trying to get one passed for the entire U.S.

Q. Wouldn’t this raise the price of gas, jack up my electric bill, and otherwise make my life miserable?

A. Yes, yes, and hopefully no. If oil, gas, and coal companies pay by the ton for the carbon their products will create, they will no doubt pass those costs on to their customers. Economists Ian Parry and Roberton Williams estimate [PDF] that a tax of $33 per ton of carbon dioxide would add about 25 cents to a gallon of gas and a couple cents to a kilowatt-hour of electricity.

But supporters of carbon taxes point out that we already pay for all that polluting — in doctor’s visits when our kids have asthma triggered by air pollution, for example, and in the million-and-one escalating costs of global warming. A carbon tax, then, is just one way of attaching the costs — and the associated disincentives — to the thing that is creating them.

Designed correctly, a carbon tax could therefore make our lives better, as the wonders of the free market create all manner of new gadgetry to get us around, heat and cool our homes, and the like, without burning all those fossil fuels.

Q. What would the government do with all that money?

A. Here’s the fun part. Those who support a carbon tax want to take all the money that’s collected and … wait for it … give it to us, either by reducing other taxes (i.e. income tax) or just writing us monthly dividend checks. We can then take the money and either 1. continue to fill up the tank with more expensive gasoline, or 2. find a less expensive way to get to the grocery store.

Critics are skeptical that this money would actually find its way into people’s hands, but that is what proponents mean when they say that a carbon tax would be “revenue neutral.” And even conservative economists point out that this would have the added benefit of shifting taxes from things we’d like to have more of (i.e., income) to things we could do with less of (i.e., pollution).

Q. Who likes carbon taxes and who doesn’t?

A. OK, this is where things go a little haywire. As I say, there’s something here for everyone to hate. But there’s also something that most everyone likes.

Environmentalists point out that a carbon tax would not, by itself, solve the climate crisis. Some read that to mean that we shouldn’t bother (incidentally, some folks who doubt the seriousness of climate change say the same thing), but most say it would be a step in the right direction.

Republicans despise them (either because they deny that climate change is happening or because carbon taxes include the T word) except when they don’t. Former U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis, a Republican from South Carolina, has launched the Energy & Enterprise Initiative to promote conservative solutions to global warming — chief among them a carbon tax. He calls a carbon tax the “free-enterprise” solution to global warming, arguing that it would spur the creation of “the fuels of the future.”

Most Democrats have been mum about climate change solutions since their cap-and-trade bill got a drubbing in 2010. (Cap-and-trade is a different approach under which the government puts a ceiling on the total carbon emissions allowed and then sets up a marketplace for polluters to trade the right to produce them.) But if and when the topic surfaces again in Washington, a carbon tax will likely be toward the top of the Democrats’ list of remedies.

Even ExxonMobil — a company whose longtime CEO famously denied the plausibility of human-caused climate change – supported a carbon tax in 2009. Why? Because the company saw some sort of price on carbon as inevitable, and a tax seemed preferable to the cap-and-trade program that was up for discussion at the time.

Q. Could we see a carbon tax in the U.S.?

A. Chances of a carbon tax passing through the present Congress are about as good as a snowball’s in the warming Arctic. (Show me a politician who is willing to utter both the C word and the T word in the same sentence, and I will show you someone whose political career is nearing its end — or already over. Witness Inglis, who was ousted by a Tea Partier in the Republican primaries in 2010.) However, given the rising urgency of global warming, a carbon tax could certainly be considered, what with its free-market appeal.

There is also the matter of the “fiscal cliff” that we’re headed for when a slew of tax cuts expire at the end of 2013. MIT researchers Sebastian Rausch and John M. Reilly argue that a carbon tax could help avert economic catastrophe.

In the meantime, the good people in Australia are giving it a try. Predictably, people there hate it, except when they don’t.

Also:

From the Grist archives:

• Could carbon taxes help solve our budget woes?
• What ‘left’ and ‘right’ really mean on climate change (hint: nothing)

Video:

• Frank Ackerman, an economist at the Stockholm Environment Institute at Tufts University, offers up Carbon Pricing 101.
• Former U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis presents a conservative case for carbon taxes, and offers the Republican definition of sustainability.

Agenda 21: It’s the biggest threat to your freedom, and unless you regularly attend yahoo-filled local planning and zoning meetings, you’ve probably never even heard of it. Until recently, this 20-year-old United Nations plan to promote “sustainable development” was known only to stalwart defenders of Liberty and Freedom like the John Birch Society. But the underground resistance is about to go mainstream. GOP intellectual it boy Ted Cruz leads the counterstrike, and the Republican Party is even considering a public flambéing of Agenda 21 in its official 2012 platform.

Looking to help break the siege of bike paths and high-quality education on our freedoms? Here’s what you’ll need to know.

Want more? Read all 400+ pages of Agenda 21 on the U.N.’s website, or check out these past stories in Grist:

• Paranoia strikes deep: GOP exposes ‘dangerous’ U.N. sustainability plot
• Of soccer moms and sinister U.N. plots
• Ted Cruz, Tea Party’s new Latino hero, is a bit loony on green issues