I completely agree. I think there is a lot of private money sitting there just about ready to commit to really pushing new energy innovations and putting new low emissions technologies in place, and they're waiting for a clear signal, like a tax.
I'd say something about solar. I think we have a range of things. We have a bunch of technologies we really could build today, like nuclear power, large-scale wind power, coal with capture, and then we have a bunch of things that might play enormous roles in our energy future thirty or more years out. I think we need to have different strategies for the two of them. In my view, say, for wind power, what you need is just incentives to do it.
The wind power industry is going flat out, and we just need to give them market incentives, and they'll drive the cost down. I think the same is basically true with CO2 capture and storage. There are a bunch of serious operations in the world where people are already doing this. We have failed to execute a single major one in Canada yet, but we certainly could, and you don't need research to get ready to do it.
Solar is very different. Right now the cost of solar is 10 times roughly the cost of the competition in electricity. I don't actually think it makes sense to invest in the current generation of solar, because I don't think we're going to get to cheap solar by going down the learning curve from the current generation of solar PV. But I actually think that solar is one of the potentially most important energy sources in the long run, and there is an abundant set of options that could, with advanced research, drive the cost of solar down by a full factor of 10, making it competitive.
Nobody can tell you when those will work, but my recommendation on, say, solar would be very different from a recommendation on nuclear, which is to try building it. My recommendation on solar would be don't push it into the market now, spend a lot of money on research that offers high-payoff long shots, and a lot of money on basic solid state physics that could potentially revolutionize the way we build solar cells to make them enormously cheaper. There are plenty of ideas out there.