Via the Times, a profile of one the nation's biggest venture capital firms -- they're pushing hard for tight controls on CO2, and investing millions in the scheme, hoping to many times as much back.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley's top venture capital firms, is betting that such a cap-and-trade law or carbon tax will open the door for a new kind of software company.

Since 2007, it has been quietly incubating Hara, a start-up that on Monday will start selling software to help businesses measure and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

"This is not 'greenwash.' It's dollars to the bottom line," said John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, which invested $6 million in Hara.

Mr. Doerr, who has been a strong advocate for legislation that puts a price on carbon, says software like Hara's will be vital to making it work. "We can pass all the laws we want, but if we don't track, manage, verify and achieve the goals, we're going to be lost, and we're only going to be doing that with information technology," he said.

Amit Chatterjee, the founder and chief executive of Hara, says the name comes from the Sanskrit for "green." He previously ran a group at SAP, the software giant, that helps businesses navigate accounting regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley

Just another "right wing" "capitalist" venture. Where "capitalism" apparently means working to increase the power of the state in order to tap into the resulting stream of new taxation revenues. Powerful interests are lined up, willing to decimate the US economy (leading to an increased death toll), as long as there's a buck in it for them, that they'll be praised as "good guys", and end up on top.

A reasonable response is to ask why the affected corporations -- surely greater in number -- don't fight back?

First, there's an asymmetry of power: If you stand to gain $10,000 by taxing 1,000 people or corporations $10 each, you're more likely to spent a lot of time interfacing with the politicians than each of the people you expect to tax. They're not going to want to go out of their way to stop the bill to save only $10. Or even $100. Or even $1000, in many cases. This is especially true if they don't understand what you're doing or are even being told it's for their "good".

Second, the taxed corporations aren't really the ones who will bear the primary burden of the tax. That's you, actually, not them. If CO2 taxes add $90 to the price of each clothes dryer, the tax is passed along to you. Maytag and Whirlpool won't decide to take less profits (indeed, they'd go out of business if they did), so they simply increase the price of their products to reflect the added tax. Their competitive situation, relative to each other, remains unaltered.

And most of the people who will pay those taxes don't even understand what "cap and trade" is, or are unaware of what it will do to them. Mostly, they probably think it's a good thing, and will somehow save people's lives, or the lives of polar bears, because that's the media and public schools communicate.

If taxes become too burdensome, those taxed will demand that "the rich" (somebody else, that is) pay still more of them, even though they themselves supported the politician who generated the tax. And the rich will flee, or stop bothering to become as rich. And the taxes will dry up, and increasingly be moved down to the upper middle class, and then the middle class, and so on.

In the end, we're all much poorer -- but more equal!