WANT A REVOLUTION? TAX YOUR WAY TO IT:

Can Alternative Energy Save the Economy and the Climate?: The "new energy" economy rolls forward even as hopes for an international deal to combat climate change at Copenhagen shift into reverse. (Douglas Fischer, 11/13/09, Scientific American)

"The vast majority of the utility industry (has) pretty much accepted the reality that CO2 is something they have to cope with," said Revis James, director of the energy technology assessment center for the Electric Power Research Institute, or EPRI, a California-based nonprofit that helps drive long-range development and is coordinating carbon capture experiments at coal plants in the Midwest and Southeast.

Failure in Copenhagen won't "substantially stop what's going to happen," James added. "The utilities have to deal with (carbon emissions). They have to respond one way or another."

Many business leaders and policy analysts counter the status quo - a piecemeal, federated approach to carbon and energy emissions - doesn't carry enough of a signal to produce the revolution required of our economic and energy sectors.

Private-sector investments and regional and local government efforts to boost "green" technology are good, they say. But that's just the down payment: The transformative change necessary to avoid the worst warming won't come until the international community firmly sets a global standard in place.

"What you want is something sustainable, predictable and long-term," said Roby Roberts, spokesman for Vestas Americas. "That's what you want out of the climate rules, but that's going to be a few years away."

You'll never get it from international climate rules, but would from a punitive national gas tax.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 14, 2009 9:58 PM