First, a response to the article. The places coal power plants get built often aren't places with huge amounts of wind or sun. Transmission losses mean even if you have cheap sun in Arizona, you can't get it to Ohio economically. There's a Holy Grail solution to this that I haven't seen on many green sites, and that's room temperature superconductors. Nobody's found one as of yet (though the temperatures superconductors can operate at is rising...), but if you had a superconducting grid energy from anywhere in the world could go to anywhere in the world with zero transmission losses, in which case "there are many places with cheap wind" might actually be useful. Below room temperature such lines would have to be cooled which would waste electricity just like resistive losses do. As it stands, it's not a solution to coal.

And now some thoughts...

I think one of the failings of most environmentalists is that they don't understand the industrial angle.

In industries with high profit margins, like software or clothing, it's easy to be environmentally friendly. Solar and wind are more expensive than coal, but there's money in the bank going to nothing and it improves customers' perception of your company.

Now, commodities. Say I make aluminum. Making fresh aluminum requires electrolysis, meaning a _lot_ of electricity. Nobody makes much money on aluminum, because aluminum is more or less aluminum regardless of who made it. Common alloys' compositions are standardized, so you can't make any profit there.

In a situation like that, if you want to be green, your costs are going to be appreciably higher, meaning your aluminum costs more than the aluminum from Joe's Pollution Factory. But people buying the aluminum don't generally care where they get it, because the product is the same. So you'll go out of business, and Joe's Pollution Factory will get more customers. Yes it hurts but that's the reality.

Now, suppose the folks buying the aluminum really do care. The question becomes, how's *their* profit margin, and how competitive is their industry? If their industry is hugely competitive and barely profitable, they've got little choice in the matter either. If they want to stay alive, they've got to save cash, and that means the environment gets to take one for the "team".

Now, there are ways out. You could have a certification program and stickers on products that say they've been "manufactured cleanly". Folks do that for organic foods. Then the questions are, (a) do most consumers have the cash for the cleanly manufactured product, which may very well cost twice as much and (b) do they care? I try to buy organic eggs and milk when I can, but as a student I couldn't afford to eat if I had to pay that level of markup for all of my food.

This is why people say wind and solar can't "keep the fires of industry burning". I can't imagine anyone *wanting* to pollute the environment they live in. But in industries without any pennies to spare, and resources that people need, cheap wins.

That said, efficiency can get you part of the way on 'cheap'. If you can make aluminum with 2% less electricity, you can charge 2% less if you use the same power generation scheme, or have a ~2% more expensive power generation scheme. But the choices are that thin.

As far as regulating carbon emissions, that's only going to work if every resource you can possibly import is required to be imported from places regulating their carbon emissions (and who's going to keep say Chinese steel manufacturers honest? China? not so much). It's worth a shot though.