Nicely formulated response.

I note that discussion of long cycle climate change can neglect effects other than global warming, viz, CO2 concentrations affect oceanic acidity in ways we are sure to find disagreeable.

However, the market always goes for the cheapest new thing, not the best new thing. Just leaving it up to the market doesn’t mean that the outcome is ‘good.’ This means that one needs an integrated policy, and that new sources also receive incentives and disincentives. For example, as you say lower weight vehicles may have to be mandated by regulation; the market won’t ‘choose’ that option if another one is cheaper.

Our single biggest problem with energy is that the highest utility and most widely available form of mid-term and long-term energy _storage_ is a five gallon can of gasoline. We really need a way to store produced energy for 24-1000 hours. The engineer and the country which gets that prize will literally change the world. Maybe it’s in India, maybe in China, maybe here. Listening, bright guys?

To S: The long cycle climatic changes pertaining to the global warming hypothesis aren’t ‘proved,’ no: by the time they are, it will be much too late to do anything to affect the outcome. The fundamental science behind the hypothesis is sound beyond doubt; what is in question is the scale and the time frame of impacts, and whether such related features such as carbon expression from permafrost or absorbtion by the oceans will mitigate or exacerbate the outcome. If we wait, we get what’s coming; if we act, we choose what’s coming, and perhaps what’s not. The argument that the science ‘isn’t proved’ is advanced by the ‘do nothing and wait’ crowd. If they are the dodos, they’ll be the last to know; most of us don’t want to wait and find out.

To Anon 8:14: The market chooses what it cheapest for the choser, not what is best for the users. This is a fundmental error for capitalism. Fossil fuel carbon will still be cheaper than solar for long to come—so long as we permit choosers to exclude ‘externalities’ such as pollution and climatic impact from _their_ costs. If we factor those costs into the ledger, solar is the cheaper choice ‘for society.’ Even if solar is more expensive, it’s the better choice for society, so we should be taxing the hell out of carbon-side choices to level the playing field. Cost to the chooser is not the acceptable standard for something that has group concequences, which carbon use does. This is a mental breakthrough which some societies, ours notably, find very difficult to make. It ‘dosen’t make sense’ in the dominant frame of reference, which only makes cents. We could all afford to go solar tomorrow if this is where we, as a society, decided to spend some of our surplus value added, the difference between solar and ‘other’ isn’t an order of magnitude. Not that I necessarily think solar is the only way to go.

Fundamentally, I don’t personally _care_ if it is more expensive for companies and end users to get clean(er) energy sources. It is more expensive to go to the doctor regularly than to stay home uninsured; the outcome is seldom better from that strategy, as in this instance also.

I have to beg to differ. First, McKinsey Global Institute found that despite the fact that most “global executives” (what a lousy turn of phrase) agreed they could save money by investing in energy savings, they weren’t doing it.

Second, the extreme short-sightedness, which results froma fixation with meeting quarterly targets, isn’t limited to reducing carbon emissions. One McKinsey director (this is the most senior level at that firm) told me about a major corporation whose most profitable service was an add-on to its basic service. The payback on an ad campaign to promote said service was 11 months (and customers don’t generally turn it off once they’ve signed up, so the returns are very juicy), The company nevertheless nixed the campaign because it wanted to show better results in the intervening quarters. Note I heard this about a year ago, which means the incident took place earlier, meaning when the economy was considered to be strong. And the director was clearly using this as an illustration; he had more examples like that.

Meanwhile, what does regulation do? It does things like the ethanol nightmare. For what? It costs more than gasoline, it causes global food prices to skyrocket, and it increases greenhouse gases. The US and EU are much better off just dropping the nightmare policy, and buying sugar cane ethanol from Brazil–but no, we have to have bennies for political friends and complicated regulations instead of market incentives.

Green Marketeer