Mr Peters and his colleagues see no evidence so far that carbon-control policies, weak as they are, are shifting production to less regulated countries.
This bodes ill for the passage of more difficult projects, such as his big plans for carbon-emissions control and health-care reform.
Third, the Supreme Court is to rule next year on whether the federal government has the right to control carbon-dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act.
Just days after the American election, the Canadian prime minister proposed a continental cap-and-trade system to control carbon emissions something the oil industry in Canada adamantly opposed.
Meanwhile, Governor Romney once supported a cap-and-trade mechanism to control carbon emissions but as the 2008 presidential race neared, he backed off and favored modest penalties for coal-fired power plants.
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Carbon fiber illustrates a key criterion in high-tech manufacturing: quality control.
It is also saying that carbon trading is more "flexible" than unit-by-unit command and control.
The Supreme Court agreed to wade into some of the biggest and most contentious issues facing corporations today when it accepted appeals of a massive discrimination suit against Wal-Mart Stores and a lawsuit by states seeking to control utility carbon dioxide emissions.
These include Yuri Suzuki, a materials scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who is building stacks of metal oxides in the hopes that, when combined with carbon-based materials, they'll blend into a new kind of semiconductor that can control spin at normal temperatures.
Michael K. Dorsey, a professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth and coauthor of Carbon Trading, says that while pollution-trading programs work in the U.S. to control pollutants like sulfur dioxide, it will be hard to track such schemes in developing nations.
"Investments in geo-engineering research are almost certainly the biggest bang for the buck that one could get in terms of addressing catastrophic climate change - a much, much bigger return than, for example, trying to control carbon emissions at the moment, " he says.
But should he proceed with regulations to control pollution from existing coal-fired power plants, the single largest source of carbon pollution, those regulations probably will contribute to shuttering facilities already struggling to compete with cheap natural gas.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, defying opposition from business lobbies and some fellow Republicans, agreed with Democrats who control the California legislature to cap the state's greenhouse-gas emissions and reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 25% by 2020.
Then there are the quality-control issues: On one occasion "a Spanish producer printed our labels on old, horrible carbon paper, " recalls Hughes.
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