That's actually exactly what this is. Currently coal is the cheapest electricity you can get. However, as the price of coal, oil, and natural gas goes up, and as the price of cleaner alternatives (through research, scale, etc.) goes down, we will eventually arrive at using much cleaner energy. The big problem with this is that those two prices aren't moving fast enough to avoid a global climate disaster we will be facing within several decades.

That's why the current incarnation of Capitalism (finance-based, quarterly-results oriented) is broken beyond repair. Kicking the can down the road sound like a hell of an option if you can be relatively sure there will be a different guy doing all the eventual cleanup.