If you seriously believe in markets, you should believe that given the right incentives — namely, putting a price on emissions, through either a tax or a tradable permit scheme — the economy will find lots of ways to emit less. You should definitely not believe, as anti-environmentalists claim, that the result would be economic disaster.
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The point is that renewable energy like wind and solar has not gone through a comparable process of improvement — yet — because the incentives haven’t been there. But once we get to the point where a carbon price makes these commercially viable, there’s every reason to expect huge improvement over time through, yes, the magic of the marketplace.
I’ve been fond of calling the statis quo on energy policy Carbon Socialism.
