A "highway-byway" plan for sharing costs of large high-voltage power lines, deployed last week by the Southwest Power Pool in Little Rock, Ark., could be one model for new federal transmission policy if Congress fails to produce climate and energy legislation this year, some congressional sources and industry representatives say.

Richard Sandor spent the past decade peddling a big idea: that capitalism has a solution for global warming. The trading house he launched in 2003, the Chicago Climate Exchange, would be the locomotive pulling an American environmental revolution into the 21st century as smokestack industries bought and sold a commodity called greenhouse gas emission allowances. On Friday, Sandor and the other shareholders of parent company Climate Exchange cashed out of this big idea for about $600 million.