Several years ago, Lew Hay, the dynamic chairman and CEO of FPL Group, which is the nation’s leading provider of renewable energy ($16 billion in 2008 revenues), gave an impassioned speech at a Goldman Sachs climate change conference in New York, arguing for a tax on emissions of carbon dioxide to deal with the threat of global warming. A carbon tax, he said, would be simple and fair and speed the transition to a clean-energy economy. By contrast, he said, a cap-and-trade system inevitably would be overly complicated, negotiated in Washington back rooms, subject to political horse-trading and shaped not by the public good but by special interests.
Anyone who’s paid even cursory attention to the Congressional debate over climate change knows that Hay was absolutely right.
So why, I asked him when we spoke by phone today, is he now a supporter of cap-and-trade? [click to continue…]
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