Also, please list the names of all companies where you have significant investment. I want to have my money on the same side as you after seeing how much influence you have in DC.

What if as NASA has recently reported on (solar radiation at 50 year lows), the solar radiation minimum continues, as it has in the past. Or if we get a period like the Younger Dryas and solar stays inefficient due to a scenario that is unlikely to be accountd for by greentech engineers?

That means I paid for a guy like Bill to play scientist and engineer?

If your products work they wont need price floors. But they dont. So you do.

I work as a stockbroker. Maybe we should increase trading commissions to an arbitrary high price to reduce volatility (people will be slower to buy and sell if commission is 15%). But does that really provide a benefit? It does to me and some others. But to most

I actually went to go read this article because I thought it was from Bill Gross of Pimco fame, not some moron regurgitating Nixon and Perrot election ideas.

I certainly don’t, not when the damage is potentially that extreme. So we need to hedge against that risk, and to me $100 oil is a price well worth paying if the revenue generated thereby is poured directly into alternative energy technologies.

If nothing else, it is immensely risky to base an entire economy on the perfect continuity of the global oil distribution system. A temporary disruption, for one reason or another, is almost certain to occur sooner or later, and would play havoc with the whole economy.

The unsolved problem is that it’s a regressive tax, but there are other ways around that.

Like any fledgling new thing that is worth a damn, sometimes you’ve just got to be the penguin and sit on that egg while it incubates. It is a specious argument / failed idealogy that we should just step back and take a hands off approach to important developments that affect the fate of mankind. I’m simply not convinced that a pure laissez faire approach to our energy future is the way we want to go. There are plenty of practical, real world precedents for where a laissez faire approach does not only *not* work, but where it could in fact be cataclysmic.

Consider using a laissez faire approach to replacing the Bay Bridge, for example. Certain complex and far reaching objectives require long term planning. There are occasions where design / planning are required in order to achieve a long term goal. If, as a society, we form a vision of where things need to be 10, 20, 30 years from now, it is not unreasonable to work out a strategy to ensure that those goals are achieved and that the plan is not derailed along the way.

With this in mind, it occurs to me that a strategic approach is needed. A clear example of a strategic approach vs a laissez faire approach is in how one approaches the subject of energy efficiency. Many thinkers in the renewable / clean tech space don’t question for a moment the need for technological innovations in energy efficiency – across the board. It’s gospel. But, from a certain perspective, if one is trying to effect a rapid – rather than a protracted – switchover from a dwindling fossil fuel resource to renewable sources of energy, the last thing one wants to do is allow energy efficiency technologies coming online during the decline of the limited resource to detract from the price competitive appeal of the renewable sources.

Energy efficiency has a place, and a time, but in some ways it can also buy time for existing fossil fuel sources – not desirable. It would be much better, for example, to develop energy efficiency technologies that are closely coupled to renewable energy technologies – and electricity in general – rather than efficiency that supports our continued use of fossil fuels. Good planning can allow energy efficiency development to be disproportionately / asymmetrically supportive of the switchover to renewables, rather than a thorn in its side by being undiscriminating. I would much rather see a disruptive, tipping point transformation to electric transportation than a drawn out, gasoline-transportation-on-life-support-for-decades transformation.

Saying that economics can’t (or even shouldn’t) be controlled by strategic policies is about as sensible as arguing that a complex structure like a bridge should just be able to come about naturally of its own accord. Sometimes you have to decide that you want a specific outcome and then figure out the strategy to achieve that outcome. I’m not a fan of just letting the market do whatever it wants to address our energy needs, and then – in fifty years – whatever we get is what we get. This is too important of an issue to leave to the next-fiscal-quarter mindset that besets our corporations. Strategy necessarily implies waging a battle and not just following the watercourse way. It would be naive for the cleantech industry to pretend that it’s not in a war with the fossil fuels industry. Wars are won on good strategy.

But people who are using a lot of oil, many of whom are driving much bigger cars and trucks than they need, are imposing burdens on the taxpayer. For example, Iran periodically threatens to shut down tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, through which all Persian Gulf oil travels, which would catastrophically affect world oil prices. The US Navy responds to these threats by counter-threatening that we will go to war to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. So the gasoline user is making our economy vulnerable, making war more likely, and making it necessary to spend astronomical amounts of money to build and maintain a military that can project to the Persian Gulf and overpower any major player there. And the war in Iraq was arguably started over oil. So rather than having these huge military costs be billed to everybody through the federal income tax, wouldn’t it be fairer to charge it all to a gasoline tax and thus put the burden on the people who are driving around in Hummers?

Another thing about the discussion on this thread is that everybody’s acting like this is a radical proposal that has never been tried anywhere. Europe has been taxing up the price of oil for many years, the result of which is that they drive smaller cars, use public transport more, and use much less energy than we do. I’ve seen a graph of European countries, with oil price in each country on one axis and per capita oil usage on the other axis, and there is a clear correlation — the countries with cheaper oil burn more of it. Many European countries have a higher GDP per capita than ours, higher energy costs notwithstanding.