doe eia figures indicate that approximately 85% of us energy production and economic activity in the usa is currently driven by burning fossil fuels. pricing up the cost of carbon and making coal, oil, and natural gas more expensive will have significant large negative impact on the us economy.

tilting the energy playing field by pricing up the cost of carbon based fuels, until industrial infrastructure to build more scalable and manufacturable nuclear power is readied, will come with a significant cost and will result in a dramatic drop in us economic activity. if use of solar and wind energy was close to the cost of burning the fossil fuels that currently drive the us economy then you would only have to tilt the energy playing field a small amount in order to make the diffuse renewable energy systems economically viable. the sad facts are that you have to use a large fee or carbon tax to make current wind and solar cost competitive with coal. the amount of economic distortion required to make diffuse solar and wind energy systems cost competitive would be great and would have immediate impact on jobs, manufacturing, and american quality of life.

america should demand climate remediation solutions that reduce, and not increase, the cost of energy.

improved forms of nuclear energy can generate electricity at a cost lower than burning coal [1]. america needs to reduce the regulatory obstacles to introducing better and intrinsically safer nuclear technology to a level comparable to america's industrial competition in france and asia. thorium is a neglected nuclear fuel that is more abundant than uranium and when used in special reactors (liquid fluoride thorium reactors) produces less than one hundredth the amount of nuclear waste [2].

today we live in a global economy. sustainable creation of american manufacturing jobs depends on reducing the costs of manufacturing (cost of labor, manufacturing facilities, energy, and materials) to the level of the industrial competition. just adding a huge new tax on energy that increases the cost of all american products made with or delivered to market with energy does not reduce the cost of manufacture, sustainably create jobs, or increase american competitiveness.

[1] "cost of electricity from molten salt reactors (msr)"
r. w. moir - lawrence livermore national laboratory,
http://ralphmoir.com/coe_10_2_2001.pdf

[2] le brun, c., "impact of the msbr concept technology on long lived radio toxicity and
proliferation resistance", technical meeting on fissile material management strategies for
sustainable nuclear energy, vienna 2005
http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/04/14/97/pdf/document_iaea.pdf