Eyes on a Climate Prize:Rewarding Energy Innovation to Achieve Climate Stabilization

摘要

Prizes are no panacea. Indeed, barring some serendipitous discovery, there is no panacea for the climate policy challenge. Yet, technology inducement prizes offer a relatively low cost way to encourage greater innovation than traditional grant-based R&D funding. Prizes alone will not solve the problem. Indeed, in order to encourage greater levels of technological innovation it would also be desirable to reduce existing regulatory barriers to the development and deployment of alternative technologies as well as to place a price on carbon, ideally with a simple and straight-forward carbon tax.