Cheap Oil Costs Jobs
“New energy technologies blossom when oil gets expensive. We can raise the price of fossil fuels again without hurting consumers—if we implement a fee and rebate system.”
“Today, for environmental and national security reasons, America urgently needs innovative energy solutions that can power an economy still largely driven by fossil fuels. But so long as the price of oil remains superficially cheap, the incentive to develop the next generation of energy technologies will remain weak. The lesson, then, is simple: If we could find a relatively painless way of increasing the price of fossil-fuel energy and the emission of pollutants, we could produce a similar surge of new businesses and reduce the unemployment rate—if there were a reasonable guarantee that the increased prices were permanent.”
