It seems curious that as the American people believe the president is focused like a laser beam on financial issues, other nations are seizing on President Obama’s climate change initiatives. They see what the American media has largely ignored – the president’s stimulus and spending bills include easter eggs in the form of climate change legislation.

For example, President Obama claims, despite the current “throw money at everything” approach, that he will simultaneously reduce a suddenly enormous federal deficit to $600 billion by 2012. Part of the way he plans to do it is by charging a huge new tax on people and industries that produce anything. It is called “cap and trade,” and will force everyone who emits any carbon dioxide into the air to purchase – at auction – the right to do so. Obama says this tax will bring $79 billion into government coffers in its first year, and $646 Billion by 2019. The same companies that are supposed to find money to pay workers must also find money to pay this confiscatory new environmental tax.

President Obama’s pronouncements have emboldened Green movements in other countries. The idea of a carbon tax has been bouncing around Europe for some time. But the newspaper, Les Echos, recently reported that, “L’idee de taxe carbone fait son chemin”, or “The idea of a carbon tax is gaining” in France. The article starts out by saying the concept is welcomed by Greens, and is a “reflection of Barack Obama.”

Twelve years after the US Senate passed a resolution opposing the Kyoto Treaty 95-0, there is now international expection that President Obama will not only concede to the wishes of other nations, but actually lead efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. An article in the South China Morning Post expects that a global climate change treaty will be settled in Copenhagen by the end of the year. Even China, which was largely exempt from Kyoto because it was considered an underdeveloped nation, seems willing sign a treaty to reduce its carbon emissions. But according to the Morning Post article, “the US, in Beijing’s view, has a moral obligation to make much deeper cuts, much sooner, than China.”

Right now, you would have to say President Obama appears inclined to do just that.

UPDATE 3/6/09: The following was printed in an analysis piece by a reporter based in England and printed in the The Standard and several other newspapers throughout Canada on 3/6/09:

A U.S.-China deal must include … much stronger emission curbs in the U.S. than in China in the early stages, technological help and largescale American investment in clean Chinese energy sources, and probably a carbon-trading deal as well. But if it can be done, it will provide the template on which other industrialized and industrializing countries can join up to a global deal for steep emissions cuts in Copenhagen.

The lack of reliable, real-time carbon dioxide measurements is one of the bones of contention in the reliability or believability (depending on you who talk to) of our global climate models. Because CO2 is not sufficiently measured, the CO2 numbers input into the models must be parameterized, or estimated based upon other equations. How accurate those numbers are is contested within the climate change community.

That is why the recent launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) was so highly anticipated. The satellite was designed not only to measure CO2 over land and oceans, but measure how the earth’s oceans and landmasses capture and store some portion of that CO2.

Carbon Dioxide measurements since 2005 - Mauna Loa, HI

Everyone in the scientific community was publicly disappointed that the rocket failed shortly after launch, and the $280 million satellite was destroyed. But let’s be honest – the launch failure actually benefits some of the scientists and politicians involved in the climate debate.

There are huge dollars being spent by both sides (though hardly in equal amounts) of the manmade global warming issue. Some scientists regularly quoted by the media are little more than activists in lab coats. Prolonging the debate serves their personal interests, as it keeps them in the spotlight.

The OCO could have provided answers – definitive answers – to some of the questions currently at the crux of the global warming debate. For those who make money from the climate change debate – and for a few who have become rich in the process – the loss of a satellite that could settle some of the disputed numbers has an unintended beneficial side effect: job security.

Because of the satellite’s destruction, climate modelers will continue to parameterize carbon dioxide numbers and effects, and climate debaters will continue to debate their accuracy. The climate change rhetoric will continue at shrill levels because a key question – how much carbon dioxide is in the air at any given time and what happens to it – is just another issue for debate.

UPDATE 3/2/09: One of those activists in a lab coat is NASA’s James Hansen, who urged “mass civil disobedience” during remarks to protesters who barricaded gates at a coal-fueled power plant. Hansen’s former boss wonders “why he has not been fired.”