[throwaway894345]

It's even a bit sadder than that. It would eat into profits mostly in the short term. In the longer term, we would get more efficient with our transportation and manufacturing practices: a whole host of decisions are made which assume certain energy prices--after a decade of gradually rising carbon prices, these assumptions would get revised and the whole system would be recalibrated to be more carbon efficient, thus keeping prices low for the consumer while also maintaining profitability for corporations. Moreover, we can start with an arbitrarily low carbon price so we don't break the economy (specifically the aforementioned profits), but the important bit is that we actually have a dial to turn to save the environment (which is presumably what investors fear).

[guerrilla]

That's true, both very good points... Higher-tech energy eventually gets us closer to "free" energy in the long-run. And yeah, we definitely should have faded it in.