Will Clean Energy Ever Be a Reality in the U.S.? Here's What's Standing in Our Way

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Spending $300 billion would make 50 million homes more energy-efficient and create millions of jobs, he wrote in Solar Today. If the federal government bought and installed massive amounts of photovoltaic devices, he went on, it would bring their prices down and stimulate the market the way military and space-program purchases did with computer chips. To finance this, he advocated a "cap and auction" system, which would auction off permits "where carbon fuels enter the economy" and limit total production-not "cap and trade," of which he said, "creative traders will find myriad ways to game."

More than three years later, nothing remotely close to this has happened.