I agree that providing some level of market certainty is the critical issue that the economy needs to see. It also is true that putting a price on carbon will create at least an initial round of investment revenues that we can use, if we choose them wisely, to jump-start the bringing of certain renewable technologies and efficiency technologies up to the scale that makes them truly viable in a market economy. The benefits of putting a price on carbon eventually will ripple through the economy and come to be understood as a source of job creation.
The one area where I think we need to be extremely careful is in how we mesh the mechanics of the cap-and-trade system with the current models of trade that we have in the world today. Our organization has advocated strongly on behalf of its labour and environmental partners that we need to take advantage of a combination of the mechanisms currently under debate, whether those are allowance allocations, border adjustments, or really effective and enforceable international sectoral agreements, to make sure that we don't set up a system in which there are perverse incentives for energy-intensive industries in industrial countries to shut down and relocate their production to parts of the world that are on a different time schedule or simply choose not to participate in putting a price on carbon.
Alternatively, we need to make sure that we don't put our own energy-intensive industries at a fatal economic disadvantage when it comes time to import or exchange goods in energy-intensive commodity products from or with countries that are operating under different carbon pricing systems. Whether it's allowance allocations, border adjustments, or sectoral agreements, we need to balance that problem out; otherwise, we could create a bad set of results.