re: #5 Obdicut

And? Why do we need to select the ‘best’? Putting all of our eggs in one basket is nuts. We know a lot of solutions that are promising, and we need to focus on quite a few of them. No one energy solution is going to be the magic bullet.

Please note that i said, in my original post, solutionS. That is, different areas and different activities will lend themselves to different solutions. Geothermal power is probably a great solution in some areas for some types of climate control, and it’s probably not a great solution to power cars. Or, take the case where the government decided that ethanol was a good solution to power cars. That could hardly have gone worse.

And they might come up with corn biodiesel instead. Which the government would then need to penalize because it’s not actually a good solution. So in the end, you really are relying on the government figuring out the best solution, since you’re relying on them to correctly evaluate the negatives from any particular technology. Somehow, you don’t trust them to evaluate the positive aspects of stuff, but think they’re brilliant at evaluating the negatives.

No. We are somewhat proficient in measuring the pollution output of a particular activity. We can therefore tax the activity accordingly. That is far, far, far simpler than the complex process of evolving different energy technologies for different areas and different applications as efficiently as possible.

I am not asking the government to evaluate the negatives. They need only tax emissions, which is inordinately simpler than regulating the evolution of myriad clean energy sources for myriad applications. If corn biodiesel isn’t anywhere near an economically viable solution once its emissions are taxed, it won’t be adopted. No additional government intervention needed

Hopefully i’ve helped you to capture at least a little of the logic…