Let’s see what needs doing.

• Create jobs.  Right now we’ve got about 16 million people willing to work fulltime but can’t find a job.  A good portion of these people, maybe 10 million, are receiving government unemployment checks.   So if we’re paying them anyway we might as well give them something productive to do.  Everyone knows we’ve got a $2.2 trillion backlog in various infrastructure projects.  We can can employ about 10 million people there, it is reasonably estimated.   Problem solved for the better part of the decade.
• Bring down deficits, reduce overall debt.  Creating jobs solves the short term deficits because employed people pay taxes and don’t require unemployment insurance.  If unemployment levels stay low, this creates more consistent demand which increases sales, which increases everyone’s income, including  government income.  Rationalize health care spending by implementing reforms already passed in the health care reform bill.  Maybe raise the Medicare tax up from the current 2.9% on payroll.  Raise the Social Security ‘cap’ to $180,000 from the current $106,000.    Go back to the Clinton era tax tables (see surplus).
• Diversify energy sources with a long term aim of erecting a sustainable, cleaner system.   Short term, extract more domestic petroleum and natural gas.  Use these relatively plentiful sources while subsidizing building to scale alternative sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear.  In the efficiency department, improve and build out train systems, most particularly urban subway systems.  Raise CAFE standards for autos and trucks too.  Get more with less is the basic theme.  And make it as clean as possible.
• Reduce ocean acidification.  Even if we are not responsible for climate change (most scientists think we are) no one argues about the really bad effect of the rise in ocean CO2 levels we’re experiencing.   This acidification is attacking the bottom of our ocean food chain, which covers  2/3 of our planet and supplies the major source of protein for a billion people.  High acid levels destroy coral and shellfish thus disrupting the existing food system in the ocean.   The most effective way of reducing CO2 in the atmosphere is to have more plants growing in more fertile soil.  Plants basically clean CO2 from the atmosphere.  Regenerative agriculture methods that enrich soil, such as greater use of natural compost, more advanced tilling techniques, and crop rotations that increase plant diversity and avoids leaving soil fallow, could vacuum as much as 30% of the atomosphere’s CO2.  Get rid of the $8 billion corn/ethanol subsidy which is effectively destroying soil and plant diversity in America, not to mention poisoning wide areas of the Gulf of Mexico while tying the price of oil to the price of food:  A front runner for the world’s stupidest legislation prize.
• Make our military/industrial complex more efficient.  Estimates are that we could trim $200 billion per year in the federal budget without compromising our military effectiveness.  Some argue we can’t afford to be the world’s policeman.  That’s a pipe dream because we have private assets spread around the world.  Everytime some region experiences political upset, America gets involved because American businesses have facilities there.  Being a global commercial power is expensive for many reasons, one of them being the cost of military strength to protect those commercial investments.   Efforts to build effective diplomatic alliances are far cheaper than war making.

Beezer here.  Feel welcome to add  to this list.

Scientists around the world are finding that tried and true organic farming techniques offer powerful antidotes to global warming because they gobble up carbon dioxide.  From the May Discover magazine:

“If Ohio State soil scientist Rattan Lal is right, one of the simplest solutions to climate change may be right under our feet.  With proper stewardship, Lal says, the agricultural soils of the world have the potential to soak up 13% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today–the equivalent of scrubbing every ounce of CO2 released into the atmosphere since 1980.  The claim is a bold one but researchers around the globe are digging up evidence that even modest changes to farming and ranching can have a major impact on carbon sequestration.

Some growers have already embraced an approach known as regenerative agriculture, which aims to boost soil fertility and moisture retention through established practices such as composting, keeping fields planted year-round, reducing tillage and increasing plant diversity……

Lal first came to the idea of soil as a powerful carbon sink not through an interest in climate change, but rather out of a concern for the land itself and the people who depend on its productivity.  While carbon depleted soils tend to be dry and prone to erosion, carbon-rich soil is dark, crumbly, fertile and moist.  In the 1970s and 1980s, Lal was studying soils in Africa so devoid of organic matter that the ground had become like hardened cement.  There he met Roger Ravelle, a pioneer in the study of global warming.  When Lal made a dispairing remark about the impoverished soil, Ravelle suggested the carbon had moved into the atomoshpere.  ‘I told Roger I didn’t know where it had gone; I just wanted to put it back,’ Lal recalls’.”

Beezer here.  Discover is a subscription magazine so I don’t have the full article before me, although I did read it while waiting for a relative in a doctor’s office.  The main thrust is that modern agriculture has forgotten techniques that replenish, even add to, fertile soil.  Using natural compost, including forest debris, protects and enriches the soil, which in turn better grows plants (even grass for ranching).  And this additional plant growth captures CO2.   The techniques are used by organic farmers and ranchers.  As is often the case in our world, good things produce other good things.  Modern organic agriculture efficiently produces diverse, healthy food free of artificial nitrogens, pesticides and hormones.  This agriculture adds to the natural production of fertile soils.  These are obviously good things.  And it turns out these good things produce another good thing:  The sequestration of Co2.