Eliminate the Car Tax, lower gas taxes, lower income and lower property taxes.  Always lead with tax cuts. Then setup a series of taxes designed to change people's lifestyle to be more efficient:

-Milage tax on your car, based on odometer reading your annual safety inspection.  The biggest fuel savings come from driving less.  Everyone gets the first 5K miles free; after that it is .10 a mile, up to 15K miles, above that it is .25/mile.  We don't want everyone to go out and get a new car because the carbon generated in making it is huge.  A H2 that drives 5k miles / year uses less gas than a Prius that drives 18k/year.  Not to mention the CO2 savings by making us have to build fewer roads.
-Engery Usage Taxes:  Tax on electricty usage over 8K Khw/year for households. It has to be a signifigant tax; like 4cents or so pre KWh.  Arlington County just put a tax in but it is not high enough to really encourage conservation.  A similiar tax should be put in place for natural gas.
-Materials Taxes on carbon emitting building materials like a tax on concerete -- good old cement gives off lots of CO2 when it is set.
-Tax the building not the land; or as I call it "The Free Land Initiative".  Set prooperty tax rates based on square footage and number of bathrooms; not location or lot size (your land is free).  This encourages people to think about how big they really need their house to be.  Since 1970 the average house size has increased by over 1000 square feet, but the average number of people living their has gone down.  Property tax rates based mostly on the value of the land have forced countless middle class and fixed income people out of their homes. 

All of these initiatives move our tax system from one based on fiat to one based on choices.  If you make choices that are efficient and help society you are rewarded by paying less taxes.

...except I do think you need to charge a fully internalized price for gasoline (counting national security, pollution, health and other costs not currently "internalized" in the price).  By the way, right now, Virginia gas taxes are miniscule (about 20 cents out of $3 per gallon). Cutting them will accomplish pretty much nothing.

In general, I think the most economically efficient - and also most sensible - thing to do is to tax the thing we don't want, which is carbon emissions and dependence on oil from Saudi Arabia, etc.  To do that, why not just raise the price of gasoline while cutting other taxes (preferably regressive ones) to make this completely "revenue neutral?"  And sure, lead with the tax cuts since those are always popular...

Let me add something else: many people will build huge houses in small lots because it makes not sense to be paying high costs and taxes for a lot with a small house. If you are paying a premium for the land, you may as well use as much of it as you can.

So your system will undo this trend. I like that.

sounds like The Tipping Point as it applies to climate change. What did Mr. Tidwell say about it? I get the idea that such a thing can occur in even large-universe situations where little, seemingly minor events or trends suddenly add up, accelerate, and cause a stunningly rapid change or flip flop, seemingly without warning, from an old status quo to an altogether new, different status quo.

And why not? Remember the tropical elephant ancestors discovered frozen in an ancient blizzard in Siberia? One does wonder.  So many members of the republican base refuse to acknowledge the evidence of climate change, sneering that it is controversial and has been politicized by the effete liberal elites, so it must be false. They react toward climate change as they react to anything that threatens to disturb their privileged position as the crown of creation, which is why so many grumpy old white men are republicans now, and why so many club ladies, frightened of terrorists, or so many Reagan Democrats afraid of foreign competition and of tectonic shifts in old-time moral strictures, all huddle behind the barricades and deny reality.

Perhaps if we can dvise a way for big energy companies to make a fortune out of alternate energy systems we'd have a better chance of getting their attention.  Maybe we must show localities how many jobs can be created by local energy solutions, and how local-centric alternative energy investments will add to the tax base of starving local governments. Otherwise, we'll just bumble along and fritter away the shrinking window of opportunity.

I don't know what Mr. Tidwell said about it, but -- apart from the problem of the rise in sea level if the ice caps and glaciers melt or break off -- one theory goes that if the ice caps melt, that will desalinate the ocean sufficiently to change the convection currents in the oceans.  Once the ocean currents stop carrying warm water to the poles, then maybe you get another ice age.  Here's a paper about it:
  http://www.awi.de/fi...

I'm no climatologist, so I have no idea what the truth is -- and I don't want to find out the hard way either.

I'm sad but not surprised to hear that Virginia is dead last in fighting climate change.  Even Texas, a supposedly more conservative state, is way ahead in exploiting wind power, for example. 

It's one more reason why we need to clear as many Republicans out of the state legislature as can in '07!