By Katherine Berezowskyj

This week The Economist, like many other news sources, got into the spirit of Copenhagen. The timely section “Getting Warmer: A special report on climate change and the carbon economy,” covered a series of issues that being debated at the summit right now.

In particular, the article, “Good Policy, and Bad; some mitigation policies are effective, some are efficient, and some are neither,” discusses the mechanisms that are available for emissions reduction and how effectively can incentivize clean technologies.

“Greenhouse-gas emission targets can be implemented through three sorts of policy instruments—regulation, carbon-pricing and subsidies. Governments generally like regulation (because it appears to be cost-free), economists like carbon prices (because they are efficient) and businesses like subsidies (because they get the handouts).”

As part of their analysis on some of the blunders made through subsidy incentives, they included this positive note on nuclear energy:

“Europe’s energy subsidies, unlike America’s, do not include nuclear, largely because of German opposition (which may change, following Angela Merkel’s recent election victory). Nuclear power is more expensive than coal and gas, but probably cheaper than most renewables—though nobody is sure, since political opposition has ensured that few plants have been built in the West in recent years. Nuclear power does, however, have the virtue of scale. For renewables a gigawatt of power is a massive amount; for nuclear power it is the basic unit.”