Carbon Tax

For those of you who maybe thought, wow that looked like a good policy, freedom should take a back seat for policies that good. Let me go ahead and make a specific argument about it.
If people use more electricity than they should, then it's because there's costs that they don't feel. Like costs to the environment, and costs to somebody else's comfort in some other way, econ calls those unfelt costs 'externalities.'

I really feel like emmissions trading would be a good thing. Basically, somebody (probably a government) sells pollution credits to industries that need them. This sets a cap on the amount of pollution and people who don't pollute much don't have to pay for them. This might raise the cost of coal electricity to above that of solar, since solar doesn't really pollute. A book about it.

This is the basic idea behind the Kyoto treaty, but there's a bunch of other problems that make that particular treaty a bad plan. (politics...)

Problems with Kyoto:
Harvard magazine
ktracy.com
npr