Yes, that was the article I remembered (but was too lazy to look for.) Thanks. 
Hence the positive incentives. What can I say, I like to encourage peope to do good things more than threaten them if they pony up the dough. I’m an idealist.
The idea just wouldn’t work; if we had an efficient method of extracting ambient heat for use as energy to power our ray gun or rock slinger, we should just use that power for industrial and domestic power requirements instead of generating it from fossil fuels; if the method wasn’t efficient (which is most likely the case), using it would just make things much much worse.
Probably the best method of redirecting some of the energy from sunlight back into space would be a really big mirror.
I dislike tax breaks as an incentive. Tax breaks tend to turn into tax shelters. Nope, I would prefer that the gov just say “In X number of years, your plant will be required to meet new performance standards.” X could be 10 or 15 years even. But then we would have an end point to the grandfathering. As long as someone is not required to meet all the same rules as someone else, the free market does not work and we cannot rely on the market to solve the problem. The market says “Get away with as much pollution as you can because it is cheaper direct cost to you.”