What we need is investments in actually deploying technology that we know already works.

I understand that utilities are stymied by regulations that require them to invest in the cheapest technology, narrowly defined. This means they aren’t investing in state of the art coal-fired powerplants, like IGCC (never mind things like high temperature fuel cells), but instead still building old fashioned steam turbine plants.

If Bush wanted to address this, he’d get some changes enacted that would enable the utilities to compute future costs based on assumptions about increased carbon taxes. But I can see why Bush doesn’t want to do this — he doesn’t want ‘carbon will be taxed in the future’ to become a default policy assumption.

The biggest obstacles to deploying more energy technology are, ironically, environmentalists. They’ve erected a nightmarish regulatory wall that makes building new nuclear plants no longer cost effective. The weight of regulation and liability insurance drives up the cost of nuclear power to the point where it cannot compete with coal or natural gas plants. While environmentalists are busy erecting barriers to building the best alternative technology that can be had, fossil fuel fired plants take up the slack. The real irony is that environmentalists are their own worst enemy.

In California, they’ve managed to defeat nearly every project for building new power plants and overregulated the system to the point of penalyzing producers. Energy producers are smart geese; they won’t get trapped in California.