Laura Chomiuk is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University and a volunteer with the Lansing Chapter of the Citizens Climate Lobby.

This month, NASA's Cassini mission captured a stunning image. With Saturn's rings in the foreground, we see our planet Earth as a small pinprick of light. Everyone we love, all the work we do, all the struggles we wage are encapsulated in that single dot.

Saturn's rings not only make for a beautiful setting, but they also remind us how inhospitable most of our Solar System, and Galaxy, are to life. Saturn's rings are nothing but tiny particles of ice and dust reflecting sunlight – no hope for hosting the people we love and the work we do there (or for that matter, on any of the other planets in our Solar System any century soon). Our species, and the natural world that we depend on, remains relegated to that tiny lonely dot. Our Earth is precious.

Today, the most urgent and large-scale threat to our ‘Spaceship Earth’ is climate change. The primary cause of long-term climate change is the human use of carbon-based fossil fuels.

Earth is the only home we human beings have, and we can not gamble with its future. Luckily, we have the power to fight climate change with a simple, evidence-based policy called carbon fee and dividend that has some bipartisan support. To get this proposal to the table, constituents must raise their voices to their respective members of Congress.

A carbon fee and dividend legislation, such as the one proposed by Citizens’ Climate Lobby would place a fee on carbon emissions at the source. However, 100% of the revenue generated by that fee would be returned to households on an equitable basis.

The purpose of the dividend is to help offset rising fuel costs for consumers as we transition to a clean energy economy. If your household consumes the national per capita average of carbon, your dividend would be about the same as your increased expenditure. If you use less than the national average, you will actually receive a monthly cash dividend larger than your increased expenditure.

In this way, there becomes incentive for us to all decrease our use of fossil fuels. This market-based approach would also incentivize industries and manufacturers to invest in less costly renewable energies.

CCL's carbon fee and dividend legislative proposal would start out by placing only small fees on carbon emissions ($15/ton), so as not to shock the system, but the fees (and dividends!) would increase with every passing year, growing incentives to cut use of fossil fuels and increase use of clean energy. With this gradual ramp-up, an independent policy firm (Regional Economic Models, Inc.) found that we would cut carbon emissions to 50% of 1990 levels in just 20 years.

Carbon fee and dividend would also add 2.8 million jobs to the national employment force, largely driven by the economic stimulus from the dividends.

Conservative economists support such a policy, and recently 17 Republicans in the House of Representatives signed a Republican climate resolution, which is founded on the conservative principle “to protect, conserve and be good stewards of our environment; responsibly plan for all market factors and base our policy decisions in science and quantifiable facts on the ground.’

I ask our Representative Mike Bishop to join this Republican climate resolution and the Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus. I hope you will do the same. For who can look at that lonely dot floating in space and not want to conserve it for our children?

Laura Chomiuk is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University and a volunteer with the Lansing Chapter of the Citizens Climate Lobby.