The book is The Carbon Crunch: How We’re Getting Climate Change Wrong--and How to Fix It.
The author is committed to the urgent need to reduce CO2 but makes a damming case against the failure of current alternative energy technologies and the policies that promote them.
He favors a road-map that promotes a short term emphasis on natural gas to replace the current worldwide race for coal, along with R&D to develop a wide range of potentially better technologies for the future. He supports dropping all subsidies for energy deployment, both fossil and alternative energy and imposing a small but increasing carbon tax that includes border taxation to eliminate leakage. The initial tax level would be sufficient to favor natural gas over coal, and as carbon free energy alternatives become economically viable, the tax could be gradually raised to promote their acceptance.
For StratoSolar, with initially cost competitive electricity, policies like this would make the price of StratoSolar electricity lower than fossil alternatives, accelerate the growth of installed GWp of capacity and further reduce costs. Relatively small carbon taxes would raise the price of fossil fuels and accelerate the point where StratoSolar based synthetic liquid fuels could be lower price.
By Edmund Kelly