Thank you very much. I'll try my best.
First of all, I'd like to say that I think regardless of whether we see a Democratic or a Republican president, given that the two major candidates of each party--Obama and Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party, and McCain and Huckabee, since he's still in the running--have embraced cap and trade as a way to deal with this problem, they've acknowledged that climate change is happening. As you probably know, Senator McCain has been a leader and has proposed in fact the very first cap and trade bill, and re-proposed it last year.
You're correct in that the vehicle to watch here is really the Lieberman-Warner bill. That's the first one to make it through a Senate committee with the support of Warner, who was the sole Republican. He is committed to reaching out to others in his party. Indeed, others in his party will be needed to get it through the Senate.
Should that happen in the next few months, and should the House do what they are working hard to do, which is to draft a comparable vehicle and put it on the President's desk--as I said, it's hard to predict right now whether or not this President will sign it--I do think it's very hopeful that in the next year or two we will see climate legislation here, if not in 2008 then certainly by 2010, we think.
The economic advantage story is something that some of the people running for office are telling. Certainly Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, at least, and I think to some extent John McCain, are talking about the green jobs that can come from taking this issue head-on, and the energy security benefits that also coincide with much of what you do for climate change. I also think, in the face of a potential recession, there's some wariness right now as well about whether or not a cap and trade bill would have some detrimental effect in the near term. The bill that is being discussed, the Lieberman-Warner bill, does have some cost control provisions in the form of things like offsets or borrowing from a future allocation but with payback, which are being considered. The Bingaman-Specter bill--and those folks are working very closely with the Lieberman and Warner team--has more of a traditional safety valve approach. Unfortunately, it limits the environmental integrity of the program, but that's also something that might be on the table.