Comments on: Obama Tells Senators to Use Cap and Trade to Make Polluters Pay Carbon Cost http://cleantechnica.com/2010/06/29/obama-tells-senators-to-use-cap-and-trade-to-make-polluters-pay-carbon-cost/ Clean Tech News & Views: Solar Energy News. Wind Energy News. EV News. & More. Tue, 30 Dec 2014 07:34:00 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.1 By: Susan Kraemer http://cleantechnica.com/2010/06/29/obama-tells-senators-to-use-cap-and-trade-to-make-polluters-pay-carbon-cost/#comment-9482 Wed, 14 Jul 2010 18:46:37 +0000 http://cleantechnica.com/?p=12006#comment-9482 Actually cost is coming down. ANY new energy technology, needing all new infrastructure, would be more expensive to build, initially. But clean energy has free fuel. Imagine if we hadn’t exploited coal. We hadn’t built the railroads.

Lets imagine that 18th century windmills developed into the standard energy source, James Watt and the steam engine never happened. You’d have a hard time persuading investors to build some expensive new technology based on first, mining coal, that needed to be hauled, by truck, cross country to throw on a fire, to boil water, to make steam, to turn turbines.

People would say, why bother? We have the current infrastructure of wind farms already built and turning turbines. And the fuel is free.

]]> By: Ottawa Solar Power http://cleantechnica.com/2010/06/29/obama-tells-senators-to-use-cap-and-trade-to-make-polluters-pay-carbon-cost/#comment-9481 Wed, 14 Jul 2010 17:54:01 +0000 http://cleantechnica.com/?p=12006#comment-9481 I think it is a great idea for the US to start taxing excess carbon emissions. For way too long, the United States has taken a backseat on environmental movements because they were focused on other things. It is understandable since green energies development and implementation tends to be expensive and not necessarily profit generating. However, especially in light of the recent oil crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, we can see that there are extremely high costs to ignoring the problems as well. With moves like this one, maybe the US can be a leader in green energy technologies, just as they are leaders in many other industries.

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