People who want a larger role for the “green” economy, that’s who. The latest Bloomberg Businessweek offers details:
[T]here’s a silver lining in higher oil prices—or, rather, a green lining—for Obama, who has made clean energy one of his paramount causes. Rising fuel costs could go a long way toward advancing Obama’s “Win the Future” vision of an economy remade by green technologies, including electric vehicles, advanced batteries, wind and solar power, and high-speed trains. “If you want to make people switch toward cleaner energy sources,” says Nigel J. Gault, chief U.S. economist for IHS Global Insight, “you need to change the price incentives people are facing. One way to do that would be to make traditional energy much more expensive.” …
… Truth be told, higher prices are what it takes to change the energy consumption habits of large numbers of Americans. “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu told The Wall Street Journal in 2008 when he was director of the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Chu has backed away from that view since taking office.
Higher energy prices are precisely what Obama’s proposed cap-and-trade legislation to control carbon emissions would have achieved. Had it passed Congress, the system of tradable permits would have raised the cost of carbon-generating fossil fuels, making clean energy sources more competitive.
“Competitive” is an interesting word choice, since cap-and-trade schemes would kill jobs and make American firms less competitive. In 2008, the Beacon Hill Institute crunched numbers for the John Locke Foundation to project the negative impact of cap and trade and other climate-related policies for North Carolina. Among the highlights:
“By 2011, the state would shed more than 33,000 jobs,” according to the report from the Beacon Hill Institute, the research arm of the economics department at Boston’s Suffolk University. “Annual investment would drop by about $502.4 million, real disposable income by more than $2.2 billion, and real state Gross Domestic Product by about $4.5 billion.”