This paper proposes a new Green House Gas policy building upon general consensus in scientific, political and economic communities including: 1. Concern too little progress is being made toward an integrated global approach to controlling CO2 emissions. 2. Recommendation of a carbon tax. 3. Need for increased R&D for alternative energy sources. 4. Substantially increased research and development expenditures are relatively inexpensive. Here,these elements are woven into a coherent strategy that should be farmore politically acceptable by global governments than currentalternatives. Here are its elements: 1. A small carbon tax whose proceeds are tied exclusively to energy research and development in a dedicated trust fund. 2. Deployment of the fund to demonstrate benefits of the approach and its incentives for other countries to join. 3. The establishment of a commonality of interest among participating nations. 4. Clear incentives for additional nations to participate. The ultimate goal, energy services at lower cost than today with fossil fuels, is appropriately ambitious. The proposed approach is functional, timely and will produce benefits going well beyond simply stemming global warming. It would also tend to obviate the need for implementation policy: economic choice would lead to transition to such new technologies. (C) 2014 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
