WASHINGTON — From No. 10 Downing Street in London to a U.N. conference in Nairobi to the Goddard Space Center outside the nation's capital, the science on global warming has been analyzed and the prognosis for planet Earth is not good.

The new Congress can help the United States and the Bush administration catch up with the rest of the world in stemming the damage that carbon emissions have done to our fragile atmosphere — and supercharge the national economy as well.

Barbara Boxer, the incoming chair of the Senate's Environmental and Public Works Committee, hails from a state that has largely adopted the greenhouse gas emission limits ratified by the Kyoto Protocol.

That treaty, of course, was roundly rejected by the Bush administration and ridiculed by Boxer's predecessor as chairman, the wildly anti-environmental James Inhofe, R-Okla., who persists on calling man-made global warming a hoax.

Boxer is correct when she recently stated that time is running out on global warming and that the federal government must initiate the same steps that states like California have taken to curb carbon-dioxide emissions and provide incentives for alternative and environmentally safe energy sources.

Unfortunately, even the modest steps advocated by Boxer may not be enough to prevent the Earth from changing into what Gus Speth, the dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, foresees as a "ruined world" if something is not done quickly to repair the ecological damage already done.

More than 1,000 scientists who recently gathered at the Beijing Conference on Global Environment Change warned that carbon-dioxide emissions have increased four times faster than during the past decade — an alarming development that calls for urgent and drastic action on the part of the world's "greatest carbon polluter" — the United States.

Ironically, our country also ranks at the bottom of the list of countries named by Climate Action Network-Europe as doing the least about global warming — 53rd out of 56 among industrialized nations. Only China, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia are rated worse.

The European Union, led by France, has responded responsibly to the threat to the planet's environmental health by adopting a carbon-emission tax, a move that should be copied by Congress.

The French government is imposing a 10 percent tax on coal and industrial and air transport polluters to fund alternative energy programs. The French may include a tax on imports of industrial goods on countries that refuse to adopt the Kyoto Protocol (read the United States) greenhouse gas emission restrictions after 2012.

Congress should take action to impose a carbon tax on the major polluters: the oil, gas and coal industries; electric utilities; and the manufacturers of gas-guzzling cars, SUVs and pickup trucks.

The new Democratic leadership also should ensure that the new carbon tax is not passed on to consumers by mandating that price and rate controls limit the huge profits rolled up by the energy industry in recent years. Only a bite in profits will force Big Oil, Big Gas, Big Coal and Big Auto to change their ways.

A tax on carbon emissions may cause some economic suffering at first, but that pain will quickly abate as the new tax revenues pour into the Treasury to help subsidize job-producing ethanol filling stations, offshore wind farms, huge solar power complexes and other eco-friendly energy sources.

While Democrats have been timid about passing tax increases in the past, they should not shy away from this desperately needed levy even if they can't prevent it from being passed on to consumers. It is one that the environmentally concerned Americans who constitute the new majority will be happy to pay to save their beleaguered planet.

Wayne Madsen is a contributing writer for Online Journal (www.onlinejournal.com). You can write to him c/o National Press Club, Front Desk, 529 14th Street NW, Washington, DC 20045. He wrote this commentary for McClatchy-Tribune News Services.