Yesterday I attended the Seventh Annual Regional Sustainable Development Forum, which was put on by New Ecology, Inc. and MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. This was an interesting blend of students and corporate, nonprofit, and governmental professionals gathered to discuss sustainable urban development.

This leads me to an interesting question: what is the role of policy in this space?

When I asked Ann Berwick, Undersecretary of Energy for Massachusetts, if the Patrick administration was targetting specific technologies in its energy portfolio or providing incentives and allowing the free market to decide which to build, she thankfully emphasized the free market approach. As in the earlier PosiPeople discussion about San Francisco’s ban on plastic grocery bags, I think it’s critical that policy favors the result — cleaner industry — over its specific implementations.

Currently, many of the “clean” technologies aren’t being implemented by industry because they’re not paying for the ill effects of dirty energy and hazardous materials — we are, as taxpayers and residents. Asthma and allergies caused by pollution drive up the costs of health care, for example. Industries can be incentivized to clean up by forcing them to directly bear the costs of many of these externalities. For example, both Bracken Hendricks, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and Jim Hunt, Chief of Environmental and Energy Services for the City of Boston, discussed the merits of various forms of industrial carbon regulation, which provide a way of internalizing the societal costs of dirty industry. I’ll go into these in more detail next week.

It’s great to hear these policy-setters talking so pragmatically about the funding and implementation of energy initiatives. Clearly many political leaders — at least in the Northeast — have the political will to move ahead in this area.

Disclosure: At the time of the writing of this post, I have no financial relationships with any of the organizations mentioned, except as explicitly indicated.