Some people forget that there's top-down solutions that work better than bottom-up ones. Thomas Friedman in Sunday's The New York Times:
Nothing would do more to clean our air, drive clean-tech innovation, weaken petro-dictators and reduce the deficit than a carbon tax.
Uh-huh. Nothing except a government-funded research initiative that provides billions of dollars to scientists, universities, private companies and (gasp!) government agencies to actually find better ways to power our lives.
Friedman hopes that a carbon tax will change people's energy behaviors and consumption. However, if the point of it all is energy efficiency, renewable energy and a cleaner environment, that's nowhere near enough. A carbon tax sounds lovely in theory, it does, but unless the tax is directed to cleaner and greener ways of doing things, all it means is that driving will get more expensive, heating and cooling your home will be more expensive, and your already-staggeringly-pricy bills will simply stagger higher.
If the government could fund research into renewable energy, energy and resource efficiency, and means to scrub our atmosphere of dangerously elevated and climbing CO2 levels, and do so at the same inflation-adjusted rate and with the same determination we had for the space race, we'd probably see global warming conquered in twenty years. However, there's no scientific research that House Republicans don't want to cut and gut like a bluefin on a Japanese tuna boat.
If we want better energy policy, then we need to tell our legislators at the state and federal levels--and vote out the ones who believe the Bible is all the science we'll ever need. Friedman doesn't seem to quite have that part figured out yet. Maybe he'll learn before the ice cap on Greenland melts away.