Though pundits tend to throw around both terms as if they're interchangeable, average and median are not the same thing. If you grabbed nine people off the street and put them in a room with Bill Gates, the average net worth would be in the billions. But (unless you made your selections from a very unusual street) the median worth -- the value that would split the room into two groups of five -- would be much much lower. We've all experienced the use of this difference to distort the tax debate, as Republicans use average income to make it seem as if Americans are much richer than the median income would indicate.

As it turns out, the difference between average and median is even more dramatic when looking at how release of carbon into the atmosphere is distributed across America. (note: since I first worked on this piece several days ago, Reuters has removed the original article from their site. The link above is to a summary. The published paper can be found here as a pdf.)

The variation in intensity of carbon emissions is extreme. Across 1,559 counties with at least 25,000 residents in 2002, the average carbon emissions per capita was 7.66 tons but with a median of 3.28 tons and a standard deviation of 16.9 tons.

You don't have to be a big statistics head to realize that when the standard deviation is five times the median value, you have a system that's not exactly equitable. Even the map of the data provided by the paper doesn't come close to covering the variability.

Notice something about those ranges? The range of emission in the high-carbon states is much broader than all the other ranges put together. Some states produce a lot of carbon. Others produce a lot. The data used in the study was not new, it's the 2002 set produced from the Vulcan Project and is the same source that feeds the spiffy Google Earth carbon viewer.

The fact that carbon production is far from even isn't really the point of the new report from which the blockquote above was taken. It's the politics of carbon that are being examined. Not only do some areas of America pump put much, much more CO2 than others, the location of those high and low carbon areas directly contributes to the political difficulty in getting anything done about restraining the growth in CO2.

Whether through a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade program, the impact of emissions control and pricing will not be anything like uniform across the United States. It will result in large distributive consequences and income shifts, hitting some groups far harder than others.

And where are these areas that will take the hardest hit?

Counties with high emissions per capita are likely to be poorer and represented by a more conservative legislator. According to the report, "Conservative, poor, rural areas will face a higher carbon bill under a cap and trade system than liberal, rich, urban areas."

Though the huge populations of cities like Los Angeles turn them into a carbon hotspot (with half the emissions coming from cars), when it comes back to that per person basis, high carbon emissions are really tagged to one thing: coal power plants.

Coal is shipped all over the country by rail, this is especially true of inexpensive coal from the Powder River Basin, most of which is shipped east from Wyoming to states in the Midwest and Southeast. This is how states such as Florida, which has no coal mines at all, can still produce more than a third of their power from coal. There are also states that used to be large producers of coal, but whose own mining industry has faded from its peak. These states have an existing infrastructure of coal-fired power plants, many of which have been adapted to burn the lower BTU western coal. Missouri, which produced nearly 7 million tons of coal in the 1980s, produces well less than half a million tons today, but 86% of the state's power still comes from coal. Finally, there are the states that have both a legacy of coal fired plants and high levels of production today. States like Kentucky and Indiana generate more than 90% of their power from coal. West Virginia is the champ, with 96% of the state's power production coming from coal.

By contrast, California gets only 2% of its power from coal and New York is 17% coal-fired. Vermont draws 0% coal power (so does Rhode Island, which uses almost 99% natural gas). It's this inequity that's at the center of the study. The argument is that these areas will pay the "high cost" of the transition from fossil fuels and mechanisms by which the states that "win" the fight to lower carbon emission can compensate the states that "lose."

What the report seems to be ignoring is that the costs of the current system go far beyond the relative price of electricity and the diminishing number of jobs in the mining industry. People aren't trapped in carbon-extraction industries by some law of nature. They're trapped by policy and intent. Areas that are centered on extraction industries are far more likely to be poor exactly because of the nature of these industries. These are very top heavy businesses that leave behind environmental damage, little to no infrastructure improvements, and a populace whose jobs skills are not easily transported to another industry. Over the last thirty years, voters in these areas often support conservative politicians because they see these politicians as protective of their jobs. To support these industries, conservative politicians remove regulation that would improve environmental remediation, reduce taxes that would benefit communities, and drive out unions that would protect worker's rights. The result builds a cycle that's more difficult to stop than a two-pack a day smoking habit.

Areas dependent on extraction industry might as well be mining poverty.

So why don't the people in these areas break this cycle? Because they're convinced -- with pretty good reason -- that if the carbon economy folds, they'll be out of work and the rest of the country won't lift a finger to help them. When the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, its initial impact on coal came in the form of mandated reductions in sulfur emissions. Sulfur from Midwestern power plants was spreading acid rain across the eastern half of the country, ruining lakes and killing off whole forests. The assumption was that to meet the rules coal companies would respond by using more preparation plants to reduce the sulfur in their coal, and power companies in the Midwest would add "scrubbers" to their smokestacks. But there was a simpler solution: move west. Coal in several of the Midwest's largest coal-producing areas tends to be over 2.5% sulfur. Coal in Wyoming's Powder River Basin is less than half a percent sulfur.

Mining companies shifted a larger percentage of their production to western states where coal was easy to mine, low in sulfur -- and located in states whose right to work laws allowed them to smash the union. Power companies opted for the much cheaper route of adapting their plants for western coal rather than adding scrubbers. As mine after mine closed, both sides pointed at the government and told workers that their jobs had been lost because of politicians in DC. And in a very real sense, they were right. Certainly it was the companies who made the choice on how they would meet the regulations, but if the rest of the nation was concerned about it, they didn't move to stop it. Why? It could be that while the companies had predicted a drastic increase in electricity costs with the Clean Air Act, moving to easily produced coal from large surface operations and opting for the easy out at the power plants actually reduced the cost of electricity over the next twenty years. What politician was going to say "no fair" when the power bills of their constituents were angling down?

Stringent regulation for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions will impose different costs across geographical regions. Low-carbon, environmentalist states, such as California, would bear less of the incidence of such regulation than high-carbon Midwestern states. Such anticipated costs are likely to influence Congressional voting patterns. ... In the 111th Congress, the Energy and Commerce Committee consists of members who represent high carbon districts. These geographical facts suggest that the Obama Administration and the Waxman Committee will face distributional challenges in building a majority voting coalition in favor of internalizing the carbon externality.

Actually, it's worse than the paper indicates. There is no benefit that you could offer guys like Mitch McConnell to get him to vote against the industry. Which is why the first step toward a climate change bill has already been watered down to make it more palatable to to carbon producers.

Even as House Democrats are celebrating their deal with conservative-leaning colleagues on climate change legislation, the real winners under the compromise have been the coal, electric and auto industries, who are largely the source of the nation’s carbon emissions to begin with. Details of the compromise are still emerging, but already the chief sponsors of the measure — Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) — have been forced to lower carbon-reduction targets, cut renewable fuel standards and dole out billions of dollars in benefits to the nation’s largest polluting industries.