There's quite a bit of evidence for induced innovation from energy prices. As the cost of energy goes up, so does the rate of innovation in finding more economical ways to use it.
Of course, a corollary is the Jevons paradox: as energy efficiency goes up, demand for products that use energy also goes up when energy price is held steady. A popular example is the home refrigerator, which has gotten bigger at about the same rate that it has gotten more efficient.
One way around this is to ensure that energy prices continue to increase so that efficiency gains don't lead to increased overall energy consumption. That means some kind of green tax - preferably something designed to be revenue neutral via equivalent cuts to, say, income tax.
>One way around this is to ensure that energy prices continue to increase so that efficiency gains don't lead to increased overall energy consumption. That means some kind of green tax - preferably something designed to be revenue neutral via equivalent cuts to, say, income tax.
The key is that it doesn't have to be "energy prices" but only "unsustainable energy" prices, i.e. fossil fuels. And then you have your method of making the tax revenue neutral: Tax fossil fuel, use the money to subsidize non-fossil energy. Result is that net energy prices don't rise by very much, but they shift away from fossil fuels and toward sustainable energy.
You can control how fast this happens just by adjusting the amount of the tax. And yes, imposing an immediate 10000% tax on oil would get people to stop using it very quickly indeed, but a somewhat more gradual phase out may be less disruptive -- a 50% tax, for example, with a promise to raise it even more as time passes to encourage people to buy electric cars and corporations to stop wasting money looking for new deposits of fossil fuels.
Why? There are huge benefits to society from allowing things like energy to become dirt cheap.
The mother of 100+ years ago had no option to pursue a career beyond keeping the house and making meals because she had to venture out every day to get fresh food because she had no way to store it.
She had no options for flash frozen meals that she could prepare quickly. Every dish had to be painstakingly prepared from scratch, which dominated her day.
That's just one example. There are thousands of others out there. Those thousands of other advancements have built upon each other in a cascade that has changed human existence for the better in most measurable ways.
Cheap energy without negative externalities is great. Unfortunately, the cheap energy sources we have available to us today come with horrible negative externalities - not only air pollution that causes 50,000 premature deaths a year in the United States, but also greenhouse gas emissions that are producing global warming and the devastating climatic changes that are already starting to happen.
Articles that ignore positive externalities are not meaningful.
air pollution that causes 50,000 premature deaths a year in the United States
Versus how many millions of lives that have been saved per year because of modern medicine predicated upon cheap power for the last 60 years?
greenhouse gas emissions that are producing global warming and the devastating climatic changes
Please back away from the global warming alarmist hysteria as a means for pushing governmental change. Hasn't the last 15 years of no further increase in mean temperature (despite predictions to the contrary) at least taught a little humility on the subject to believers in AGW?
We're at the end of a natural long-term cyclic temperature increase, tending to rise fast then drift down, repeating every 125,000 years or so. If AGW is significant, we may consider it beneficial to counteract trending toward the next ice age.
Yeah, they show that temperatures have plateaued for the last 15 years despite models that the IPCC was 90% certain said that temperatures would continue to increase.
We know so little about how the earth will react to higher CO2 levels. It seems that we don't at all factor in solar and other cyclical factors that may just show that we're in a typical warming period.
As a developer who has worked with physical world models before, if a model doesn't predict the future better than random guessing then it is worse than useless. In RF modeling, if we showed a customer software that predicted signal strength the way that the IPCC predicts temperature gains - we'd be laughed out the door.
More CO2 --> warmer is understood pretty well. What is not understood where else the gas can go and what feedback mechanisms there are.
A climate model is very complex, and it is build on basic premises, which can all be tested separately (like the CO2 part). Some points remain unclear:
For example, a great part of the CO2 that has already been emitted has apparently gone into the ocean (which will lead to acidification, another problem). The ocean has a turn-over time of about 1000 years, so we can expect more uptake. On the other hand, a warmer ocean can dissolve less gas. ..it's a very long list of interleaved issues, and small changes of parameters (whose values are not known precisely) can change big things. Great care is taken in making these models. Scientists are usually not interested in politics very much. Even if a few had an agenda, they wouldn't manage to push a made-up idea.
Btw, the solar influence is also factored in (see [1]). The next ice age would be due soon, but it won't happen due to the CO2 (a good thing, I reckon).
Looking at the climate history of our planet is a scary thing since it is far from stable. It appears that there are periods where the whole globe was covered in ice, and periods where it was very much warmer than today. It's ok for life, but not for individual species such as us who have build their civilisation on one specific situation (precipitation patterns!). In the long run, we will have to manage/stabilize the climate anyway, so research is needed either way.
disclaimer:
I study and do research in this area. If I could show there was no problem, I'd be a hero; nobody of us wants this. My professors seem to have given up on the issue at this point.
Can I answer some questions or is this a lost battle as it is so very often?
> they show that temperatures have plateaued for the last 15 years
No, they really don't. The variation over the past 15 years, like the variation over the previous 120 years, is entirely consistent with a steady upward trend. Cherry-picking start and end dates is bad data analysis, period.
Of course, a corollary is the Jevons paradox: as energy efficiency goes up, demand for products that use energy also goes up when energy price is held steady. A popular example is the home refrigerator, which has gotten bigger at about the same rate that it has gotten more efficient.
One way around this is to ensure that energy prices continue to increase so that efficiency gains don't lead to increased overall energy consumption. That means some kind of green tax - preferably something designed to be revenue neutral via equivalent cuts to, say, income tax.