Hint: The key is to pour real capital into clean technology, not political capital into a cap-and-trade plan.
Here's a teaser, but go read the whole thing:
Greens have sunk enormous political and intellectual capital into an emissions reduction framework that simply can't succeed - at least as long as the price gap between fossil fuels and clean alternatives remains large and so requires the maintenance of high carbon prices to close. This is what we identified in 2007 as "global warming's Gordian Knot": price carbon too high and provoke political backlash that results in the evisceration of emissions caps and other policies to reduce emissions; price it too low, and you don't have a sufficiently high price to drive the innovation and technology investment necessary to make the transition to clean energy alternatives.The main point - Why is so little money being set aside to fund research into cleaner energy?
clean tech does have a handy lobby-the sector overwhelmingly supported President Obama. The DOE, meanwhile, has put out a call for “transformational” energy technologies, but with only modest funding...
Read full from Keith Johnson's Wall Street Journal Blog