Krause uses the scare figure of $1870 per household as the energy costs from the bill. Setting aside the fact that he doesn’t explain if this is an annual cost, or the present value of future costs (if it’s the latter, then it has less impact on your budget than your daily newspaper), Krause’s figure is just wrong. While the most authoritative source on costs from legislation – the Congressional Budget Office – hasn’t published an analysis of the Kerry-Boxer bill, in June it published a breakdown of the costs from the similar Waxman-Markey bill. The key finding there was that the energy costs were an order of magnitude smaller: “the net economywide cost of the GHG cap-and-trade program would be about $22 billion—or about $175 per household.” Even better, those in the lowest quintile of households will see a net benefit of $40 a year.

Krause claims that Kerry-Boxer is “not a climate bill” because “the United States acting alone will have virtually no effect on global warming.” He’s right that the US acting alone will not solve this problem, which is why the Kerry-Boxer bill is more vital than ever. As the world’s largest economy, US leadership on this issue is what will allow us to meet the challenge of climate change. The fact that over the past decade the US has not done anything to address climate change – and under the previous administration was denying that it was an issue – has given large parts of the world cover to not act on the issue. With the US addressing the problem domestically, we can now lead on this global issue and use diplomacy to work with our partners and other major polluters in such venues as last month’s G-20 meeting and this winter’s climate change conference in Copenhagen.

Finally, Krause also ignores the fact that farmers are some of the worst effected by climate change. Climate change just isn’t about rising temperatures. It’s also about rapidly changing weather patterns that can bring drought to the Great Plains or devasting strengthened hurricanes through the breadbasket of America, the Midwest. Rather than protect farmers, by being on the wrong side of the issue, the Farm Bureau is putting farmers in harm’s way. This threatens not only their livelihood, but also our national food security. By ignoring the challenge of climate change now, we will reap the whirlwind later.

The website is a particularly transparent attempt at astroturfing to try and convince Congress that Americans aren’t looking for a solution to the threats of climate change. But I wanted to highlight one way they try inaccurately frame the way we can face the challenge of climate change head-on. In the letter the website generates for you to send to you Representative or Senator, they characterize cap and trade solutions to emissions problems as “attempts to choose winners and losers.” The whole point behind a cap-and-trade model is that it doesn’t pick winners and losers – it uses market signals to incentivise carbon emitters to minimize their pollution when it is cost-effective.

More generally, the site tries to paint emissions trading as a speculative idea that hasn’t been tried and will cost the American people jobs & money. But this ignores the fact that we’ve had almost twenty years of cap and trade in emissions of sulfur dioxide – the main ingredient in acid rain. In the twenty years since the Clean Air Act, the threat of forests in the United States denuded by acid rain has been met by a cap-and-trade program that has succeeded beyond our wildest imaginations. The reductions in sulfur dioxide reached the 2010 levels three years ahead of schedule. This decline in acid rain – 35% here in the Northeast, 33% in the Midwest – didn’t cost us jobs, and in fact was part of the unprecedented economic growth of the Clinton years.

Far from being a threat to our economy, the Waxman-Markey bill allows us to face the threat of climate change in a way that will allow our economy to get back on its feet.