Best Counterargument to Price on Carbon Hurting Jobs?

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At yesterday’s Sustainable Industries Economic Forum, keynote presenter Paul Hawken was asked, “What is the best counterargument to the argument that carbon caps will raise energy costs and hurt our economy?”  In typical Hawken style, his earlier speech was well done, inspiring and insightful.  In typical Hawken style, his off-the-cuff answers to audience questions was where he really shone.  And this answer was perhaps his shining moment of the day. Chip in a few dollars a month to help support independent cleantech coverage that helps to accelerate the cleantech revolution! Hawken said, “If you had a child molester in your neighborhood who’s offering babysitting for $7 per hour, and then a nice girl named Betty comes and says she charges $10 per hour, are you going to say, ‘sorry Betty, he only charges $7’.”

So when did coal become our benchmark?  Sure, solar is kind of a hassle, so let’s just do mountain top removal instead.  Yeah, great idea.  Half the lakes in the U.S. are so contaminated with mercury you can’t fish them.  And that’s coal.  So, thanks a lot coal!

We need to convey this in a much more powerful way.

The idea of the right wing saying that a price on carbon is going to punish the middle class…it’s only through the incentive of innovation that we can get the world change we need.  By keeping energy costs so low, we’re suppressing innovation.  Why would anyone do weatherization unless they had an incentive to?

Programs that reduce the upfront cost of weatherization and efficiency upgrades will help defray the costs over time so that they will be offset by reduced energy usage, and these kinds of innovations can become widespread only if we all share the opportunity that cap and trade and other prices on carbon give us.

Scott Cooney is author of Build a Green Small Business:  Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur (McGraw-Hill)

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Scott Cooney

Scott Cooney (twitter: scottcooney) is a serial eco-entrepreneur focused on making the world a better place for all its residents. Scott is the founder of CleanTechnica and was just smart enough to hire someone smarter than him to run it. He then started Pono Home, a service that greens homes, which has performed efficiency retrofits on more than 16,000 homes and small businesses, reducing carbon pollution by more than 27 million pounds a year and saving customers more than $6.3 million a year on their utilities. In a previous life, Scott was an adjunct professor of Sustainability in the MBA program at the University of Hawai'i, and author of Build a Green Small Business: Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur (McGraw-Hill) , and Green Living Ideas.

Scott Cooney has 147 posts and counting. See all posts by Scott Cooney