Because of this divide, our government has not been able to put in place the long-term policies needed to guard against detonating our mounting debt bomb and climate bomb. As such, we’re in effect putting our kids’ future in the hands of the two most merciless forces on the planet: the Market and Mother Nature.

As the environmentalist Rob Watson likes to say, “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics.” That’s all she is. You can’t spin her; you can’t sweet-talk her. You can’t say, “Hey, Mother Nature, we’re having a bad recession, could you take a year off?” No, she’s going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate, based on the amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere, and as Watson likes to add: “Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats a thousand.”

Ditto the market. The market is just a second-by-second snapshot of the balance between greed and fear. You can’t spin it or sweet-talk it. And you never know when that balance between greed and fear on the dollar is going to tip over into fear in a nonlinear way.

That is why I was heartened to see the liberal Center for American Progress stating last week that, while the stimulus is vital to rescuing our economy, the size of projected budget deficits demand that we also start thinking about broad-based tax increases and reductions in some spending and entitlement programs supported by liberals. I am equally heartened when I see Republicans like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger urging his party to start taking climate change seriously.

But we also need to act. If we don’t, we will be leaving our children to the tender mercies of the Market and Mother Nature alone to shape their futures.

This moment reminds me of an image John Holdren, the president’s science adviser, uses when discussing the threat of climate change, but it also applies to the dollar: “We’re driving in a car with bad brakes in a fog and heading for a cliff. We know for sure that cliff is out there. We just don’t know exactly where it is. Prudence would suggest that we should start putting on the brakes.”