The Cap and Trade We Need

摘要

Since he launched his campaign for president in 2007, Pres Barack Obama has promised legislation that would deliver more clean energy jobs through the creation of new and larger clean energy industries to drive future economic growth. While clean energy technologies have made great advances in recent decades in terms of price and performance, they simply remain too expensive. Yet as recent developments in both the US Congress and international negotiations have made clear, the public in neither the US nor China and India are willing to pay much more for cleaner alternatives. As such, the central objective of US climate and energy policy must be to rapidly drive the real, unsubsidized costs of clean energy technologies down as rapidly as possible to make clean energy cheap.