Just read their article on The World’s Most Innovative Companies and coffee came out of my nose when I read this.
If the nation’s objective is to see more power companies behave as innovatively as NextEra does, the solution is clear: Introduce real competition across the country, create strong portfolio standards, and allow better price signals into the market through a carbon tax or a 100% auction-based cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases. [emphasis mine]
Wha?! For a “business” magazine that is naive enough to list GE as a top 10 innovator for it’s phony green initiatives and hostile enough toward capitalism to cheerlead for “Ethonomics,” I guess ignorance is bliss.
The whole business is, as Dr. Steve says, sub-mental. And why invent an entirely new regulatory compliance regime when the old one is so ineffective (the EPA)?
Let’s scrap it and simply revert to the system of torts of property trespass that existed prior to the 19th century – trespass of harmful pollution (like mercury from coal-fired power plants) is tortious and the damages unlimited – within 1 year few to no coal-fired power plants will put out any measurable mercury, because they will almost all close down, problem solves AND CO2 problem solved.
To do this, the government has to stop subsidizing and regulating nuclear energy, and subject it to the same unlimited tort regime. We would very quickly have safe, clean, low-waste nuclear energy, instead of the retarded system of expensive, unsafe, and dirty nukes we have now.