President Obama was in New Hampshire this week and he admitted that cap and trade may need to go in order to get a climate change bill through Congress, more accurately, through the senate.

"We may be able to separate these things out. It's conceivable that that's where the Senate ends up. But the concept of incentivising clean energy so that it's the cheaper, more effective kind of energy, is one that's been proven to work, and it's a market-based approach,” Obama said.

You have to incentivize clean energy- but it needs to be more forceful than that. I can see that the U.S. government is not going to have the guts and the resolve to implement a cap and trade system, though it is the only real way to force companies to actually limit their greenhouse gas emissions. Unless market incentives can make it overwhelmingly better to use clean energy and make other kinds of green upgrades, nobody is going to do it. A tax break here and a rebate there aren’t going to get the job done. It needs to be stupidly obvious to anyone that you will save millions of dollars by switching over from dirty to clean practices. What do I mean by that? Here are a few basic ideas:

1. Clean Energy Use. It’s out there. Give large corporations a 100% energy tax deduction for using clean energy. Then institute an incremental tax on using fossil fuels. In 5 years or so it will be stupid not to do whatever you can to use clean energy.
2. Give free health insurance to the companies who use clean energy.
3. Offer stimulus money to large corporations to install their own energy production, like solar panels or windmills. Check out the Fort Collins- based New Belgium Brewery for an example of how this can work.
4. Give a ton of press to any company that does anything. If you install solar panels, you get press. You get a shout out from the White House. You get to be in a new White House monthly memo on the “Green Leaders of Tomorrow Today” or something. You don’t do it, you get nothing.
5. Raise taxes on fossil fuel energy. Eliminate taxes on clean energy until it hits 30% saturation across the country, then you can think about taxing it, once it’s hit the tipping point.

Just a few ideas. The point is, it needs to be dramatic and emphatic. It cannot be a whimper. Companies need to know that the money it would cost to switch would be worth it- and it would be incredibly expensive. The problem, though, is that most will just keep operating as they are until they HAVE to switch- it’s just good business. Make it good business to switch now and you’ve got something.

"No matter how good the technology is, if you're not factoring in the soot that is going to be put in the atmosphere, then coal is going to be cheaper for a long time. I don't want us to just say the easy way out is for us to just give a bunch of tax credits to clean energy companies. The market works best when it responds to price,” Obama said.

Yep, no argument. So the answer is to change the price.

Photo Credit: Jcwinnie (via Flickr under CCL)