Nighttime Must-Read: Adam Ozimek: Dirty Energy Taxes and Clean Energy Innovation

…For clean energy to become globally dominant faster it’s better for the U.S. to just subsidize solar innovation and let the untaxed U.S. market price of dirty energy stand as a strong incentive for solar to drive costs lower…. Taxing dirty energy and using all the money for subsidies of clean tech innovation is really more efficient than subsidies without taxes…. The money for subsidies will need to come from somewhere…. [And perhaps] economies of scale and learning by doing are extremely important in this industry…. The downward march of solar energy costs is perhaps the most important factor determining how successful we will be at mitigating global warming, and I think policy should really be almost entirely about how do we keep this going and how do we accelerate it…