Cash for Clunkers for Coal Power Plants?

In an opinion piece in Sunday's edition of the Wall Street Journal, T. Boone Pickens and Ted Turner talk about the future of energy. One interesting suggestion they make is a kind of scaled up Cash for Clunkers program (everybody's jumping on the bandwagon, even Bill Clinton with EVs for Clunkers) that would be applied at the utility level; Incentives would be offered to encourage operators to retire their most polluting power plants.

I did not expect that at all. I knew Pickens wanted to pull us off foreign oil with his wind farms but not Turner. I thought the Cash for Clunkers was a good intention with ok results. I did kind of wish it had a higher MPG rating (instead of 18 MPG maybe, 20 - 25 MPG). Does this change your mind about the concept?

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009...

Incentives for companies that have had their best years in history under the Bush Administration? Why not incent them to spend their own money for once? The cars program was designed in part to help an ailing industry, not give handouts to flush ones.

Personally, there are plenty of incentives and offers in the recent Kyoto. The issue is that Bush era politics refused to adopt it, preferring to scale back to pre-80's standards. The roadmap to clean energy is out there. We just need to adopt it.

This strikes me as far more sensible, at least from the perspective of, you know, actually helping the environment instead of maintaining the status quo. It funnels money to an industry that should grow (green energy) instead to an industry that should shrink (automobiles). Since power generation isn't and can't go away, making it cleaner will pay environmental dividends.

KingGorilla wrote:

Personally, there are plenty of incentives and offers in the recent Kyoto. The issue is that Bush era politics refused to adopt it, preferring to scale back to pre-80's standards. The roadmap to clean energy is out there. We just need to adopt it.

Is Kyoto actually working in Europe?