Then the hard part starts. There are many industrial processes that have been designed and optimized around carbon fuels as an input, for chemistry rather than just for heat. Just one example, iron ore is smelted by partially burning coke (made by baking certain grades of coal to drive off all the volatile content) to carbon monoxide (CO) and then reacting this with the ore. E.g.:
3 CO + Fe2O3 –> 2 Fe + 3 CO2

(Note: Iron forms several different oxides, so the exact reaction quantities vary depending on your ore.) It is possible to electrolyze water with nuclear power, and use the hydrogen instead:
3 H2 + Fe2O3 –> 2 Fe + 3 H2O

Hydrogen-reduction has been done in the laboratory. It might even have been used in small scale industrial applications for hard to smelt specialty metals (not iron!), because H2 can be purified, while coal and coke are mixtures of carbon, rocks, and other impurities. It’s never been done at the scale of normal steel production, and it will change all the other side reactions that occur in a blast furnace. Basically, we’ll be asking smelters and many other industries to go back to about 1800, re-do all their process optimization from there, and replace their plants with new ones built for the changed processes – several times until they get through all the trial and error tweaking.

And when that’s all done, at least fifty years from now if we start working on it right now, that leaves the other 40 percent that can’t be plugged into the electric grid. And replacing your gasoline tank with a hydrogen tank is not a practical solution with any technology currently in sight…

“And maybe America, and Europe, and Japan, and Canada — the rich counties — would say, ‘OK, we just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions ’cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren.’ We could do that.

But if we did that, you know as well as I do, China and India and Indonesia and Vietnam and Mexico and Brazil and the Ukraine, and all the other countries will never agree to stay poor to save the planet for our grandchildren. The only way we can do this is if we get back in the world’s fight against global warming and prove it is good economics that we will create more jobs to build a sustainable economy that saves the planet for our children and grandchildren. It is the only way it will work.

Capitalist entreprenuers, developing drastically cheaper energy technologies, is the only solution that will actually work.

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/aboutcdiac.html
“The Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (Thomas A. Boden, Director), which includes the World Data Center for Atmospheric Trace Gases, has served as the primary climate-change data and information analysis center of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) since 1982.”

What would be the effect of replacing the tax on income (which is usually regarded as a good thing and not something you want to discourage) with a tax on carbon (which in the quantities now being emitted is generally considered a bad thing for the climate)? For taxpayers, overall, there would be no effect (the poor again could be helped by additional earned income credits). For the Treasury, there would be no effect – dollars netted would be the same. Yet there would be a great overall effect in a) reducing carbon emissions and helping to stabilize the climate b) spurring innovation into energy efficiency and solar power which would reduce our dependence on foreign oil and create whole new industries which would produce products that we could export to other countries.

This is a far better way to go than spending two trillion in Iraq trying to keep control of Mideast oil, or of subsidizing ethanol which entails a whole host of problems.