The only solution. So why aren’t politicians competing to see who can lower oil consumption more? Republicans are going after programs they once supported to seed the advanced battery and auto industries. They’re fighting to protect oil subsidies and slash transit funding. They’re scolding the military for trying to use less oil. They love oil, love oil companies, and love sprawl.
Dems, meanwhile, have managed to hang tough on fuel-efficiency standards and fight off serial attacks on EPA, for the most part anyway. But that’s about it. When gas prices go up, they panic, and it’s the usual cacophony about speculators and strategic oil reserves and Big Oil profiteering.
http://grist.org/energy-policy/the-only-solution-to-high-gas-prices-with-charts/
The lack of ability to stay out of linear thinking is a curse on all of our houses.
First off, there's no "solution" that will lower oil consumption and therefore prices. As the price of oil decreases, the relative utility increases, and the number of ways oil may be productively, profitably employed increases. In short, there's little reason to think that decreasing demand, and therefore short term price reductions, won't result in increasing demand.
Nevermind that all this green energy nonsense ignores a fundamental reality - when you build a car, you expend as much oil as the car will burn in its lifetime on the manufacturing process for the car. IOW, if you want to reduce consumption, you will have to reduce manufacturing - of cars and most other stuff too. Pretending you can influence these matters by looking only at something like "efficiency" in the product is half baked thinking.
What one would have to do to begin to know whether there's more benefit than cost - in other words, to evaluate trade offs instead of pretending that there's a "solution" - is a comprehensive analsis of multiple variates.
But the truth is, no one knows what will happen when these ideas become legislation. Coercive manipulations of human choices ALWAYS have unintended negative consequences, and ususally they are borne by the least capable, least adaptable of us. In this way, while the elites dole out goodies with their right hand to the "disenfranchised" to make themselves feel better, they smack them in the back of their heads with the left hand. This is the hubris of men who think they can play god.
Dems, meanwhile, have managed to hang tough on fuel-efficiency standards and fight off serial attacks on EPA, for the most part anyway. But that’s about it. When gas prices go up, they panic, and it’s the usual cacophony about speculators and strategic oil reserves and Big Oil profiteering.
http://grist.org/energy-policy/the-only-solution-to-high-gas-prices-with-charts/
The lack of ability to stay out of linear thinking is a curse on all of our houses.
First off, there's no "solution" that will lower oil consumption and therefore prices. As the price of oil decreases, the relative utility increases, and the number of ways oil may be productively, profitably employed increases. In short, there's little reason to think that decreasing demand, and therefore short term price reductions, won't result in increasing demand.
Nevermind that all this green energy nonsense ignores a fundamental reality - when you build a car, you expend as much oil as the car will burn in its lifetime on the manufacturing process for the car. IOW, if you want to reduce consumption, you will have to reduce manufacturing - of cars and most other stuff too. Pretending you can influence these matters by looking only at something like "efficiency" in the product is half baked thinking.
What one would have to do to begin to know whether there's more benefit than cost - in other words, to evaluate trade offs instead of pretending that there's a "solution" - is a comprehensive analsis of multiple variates.
But the truth is, no one knows what will happen when these ideas become legislation. Coercive manipulations of human choices ALWAYS have unintended negative consequences, and ususally they are borne by the least capable, least adaptable of us. In this way, while the elites dole out goodies with their right hand to the "disenfranchised" to make themselves feel better, they smack them in the back of their heads with the left hand. This is the hubris of men who think they can play god.
No comments:
Post a Comment