President Obama faces an urgent December deadline in Copenhagen. His success or failure will determine whether the world drifts listlessly or makes a bold course change commensurate with the urgency of the climate crisis. New science since IPCC 2007 reinforces this immediacy, given the acceleration of global ice melt, extreme weather events, dangerous feedback loops, and potentially irreversible changes.

When the president arrives in Denmark, Obama must be armed with real climate policy achievements. With his selection of his cabinet, he has shown he is serious about climate. The "new energy economy" is his choice for driving the renewal of the entire economy, calling it "my top priority." Of $150 billion he promised over 10 years for clean energy investments, he has already delivered one-third. But this public investment is a faint shadow of the industrial recapitalization driven by an ever-rising price signal from science-based legislation that limits and deeply lowers CO2.

Congress faces considerable debate about what form the cap and price signal takes, but to be environmentally effective, economically palatable in these troubling times, and politically enduring, it must be part of the foundation for a global recovery, and must protect families from rising costs of fossil fuels.