Is industry jumping on board carbon pricing?
"We need to reaffirm the principle of predictability," George David, chairman of United Technologies Corp, told the House of Representatives Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.
"We need to say to our world that we are going to have a cost of carbon, whether it's cap-and-trade or a carbon tax," he said in a hearing in Hartford, Connecticut, where United Tech, the world's largest maker of elevators and air conditioners, is headquartered. "There's got to be an understanding that the cost of energy is going to be high for a long time."
David declined to back a particular approach for assigning a cost to emissions of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas associated with global climate change.
But John Rice, a General Electric Co vice chairman, said GE sees cap-and-trade as the way to go.
GE, the second-largest U.S. company by market value, makes both energy-producing devices from equipment for coal plants to windmills and energy-consuming products like jet engines.
"We believe that a cap-and-trade program can provide a reliable market pricing mechanism for carbon," Rice said.
