“Energy efficiency” is
THE benchmark, at least
in the short term until we have the ability to get to grips with zero CO2 energy cycles. I think you’re missing the point if you think striving for energy efficiency is in any way contrary to a free market economy. Or do you think that Wal Mart, for example, is in the hands of wild tree-hugging philantrophists because they’re actively working for less energy hungry trucks, projecting an efficiency for their fleet two times better than now by 2015?
No, they’re looking to reduce their overhead and taking measures to project a responsible image towards their own customers in a future that, to put it mildly, by all projections is “climatologically challenged”. They will place orders for their trucks from those manufacturers that meet their challenge best, and as they’re a major client, the manufacturers will fall over each other to accommodate their wishes.
http://transport.seekingalpha.com/article/24037
In my view, the problem is that energy has really never been a free market commodity. Energy grids have been knowingly built mostly as one way funnels, discouraging competition. Global power politics have dictated (and alas, the trend continues) that only very centralized, mostly authoritarian, energy structures have been supported. This has spawned cartels, national and international, and a wave of nationalisations of oil fields and oil companies only very recently. Cartels aren’t born solely because some practices are profitable – since they limit competition, they’re very useful in making a killing from things that shouldn’t be profitable at all. They’re symptomatic. The likes of Exxon and Shell are examples of major private companies that work by free market principles (and try to diversify), but represent only a fraction of the global oil and gas fields and IMHO have to trade in a very distorted marketplace.
Armies require weapons and energy, and it is only “logical” within a shortsighted framework to construct grids and structures that require the civilian community to join in and thus subsidize the upkeep of those operations. (US army is the largest single oil consumer in the country by a huge margin, Iran has offered “energy independency” as a rationale for their nukes program etc.) Quite naturally then, these things create instability, massive inefficiency, distort the economy beyond recognition and create forces that prohibit any real free market competition and favor vested interests, oligarchs, goal oriented religious extremism etc. It is a vicious cycle, one that economical, environment, social and security considerations may force us to break, finally.
This requires foresight and thought. Security is much more complex than having the biggest guns, and wealth in a free market economy is much more diverse than only the green stuff that can be found in wallets. (No, it isn't mold either!) Wealth made of is productivity and efficiency, and we’ve somehow disregarded the massive production that has gone on around us in the ecosystem. For free. We’ve destroyed a large part of that wealth production capability and are finding ourselves unable to reproduce it by our own wits and inefficient processes. We've broken the cycles instead of tapping into them. Our collective conscious human intelligence doesn’t yet match the innate sense in the processes of our planet. Too bad our stupidity managed to beat us to it.
In a decentralized, truly free market energy economy I can imagine gasoline would by no means be the most cost effective energy commodity to provide mobility. I believe the recent price hikes, so baffling to many, are just beginning to uncover the reality as it becomes more and more expensive to patch up the facades of fundamentally unsustainable practices. Too bad change only seems to happen when it is forced upon us. We could have it so much easier.
California (I see you’ve listed that as your “location”) has had its moments at the hands of energy companies and their ways of operating in the “free market”, too. Not long ago, I vaguely remember, there were large scale blackouts when they weren’t up to the task, despite having beat their “competition” to provide power. I wonder, in what light you see the state environmental legislation of the recent administrations? The “Governator” being the latest to enact those sort of things. Surely the experiences and impressions can’t be all negative?
http://www.fypower.org/
There are of course challenges in how one goes about to incorporate the losses that occur in the environment (and subsequently economy) in 50 or more years after the action (and the profit)? The so called carbon trading has had serious issues because governments have originally set the CO2 quotas arbitrarily high and significant parts of the World are not incorporated in the scheme anyway. So I agree, bungling, nanny-state bureaucrats are not the answer. At least if they’re left at their own devices and dismissed as a separate incompetent entity out of hand.
A free market economy is not contrary to setting limits and perceiving them. We make such appraisals to determine what’s profitable and possible in such a system in the first place. Some limits can stifle competition, evolution and creativity, some can encourage those. (The biosphere has never been short of evolution!) That’s the difference between artificial and real limits. You should not assume that every limit is mainly artificial. To categorically go against any limits is an exercise in ideology, but in the end one can’t eat or breathe that.
There’s at least one thing that comes even before free markets, and that’s free thought. In F1, we can decide what we
want , we can perceive what we
need . I would say liberalizing technology and setting really tough energy limits (joules/mile), tightened every time more performance per gallon is tweaked out of the machines (to keep the speeds reasonable), is the best thing that could happen to the sport. Perhaps accompanied by less restrictive limits to completely renewable fuels.
In the same way we can decide what we want and need to do with our environment in a larger context in complete harmony with looking after our financial and patriotic hineys. I don’t claim to have much in the way of solutions and answers, or that my logic is somehow infallible. But I damn sure will make every effort to accommodate and preserve an environment that can enable and provide those answers and that logic. And that can happen only by exchanging free thoughts.
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