Comments Elsewhere

Well, Roberts seems to be suggesting a couple of different directions in his comments. One of them is radically reducing the amount of energy consumed; another is lifting government subsidies that heavily favor big, centralized power generation over decentralized production (at the level of neighborhoods or individual homes). I think actually the latter has a lot more practical potential than the former: rewiring homes to draw electricity off a local source requires quite a bit of capital up front, but drastically overhauling lifestyles to drop energy consumption by 2/3 will involve a lot more of a cost upfront. There’s also good reason to think that, once the current regime of subsidies and government-granted privileges is knocked down, the market will quite naturally adjust to more decentralized production, without needing to get people to fundamentally change their attitudes towards power consumption. (That’s leaving aside the question of whether getting people to fundamentally change their attitudes would be a good thing; maybe it would be, but I wouldn’t count on that alone, or even primarily, to solve pressing environmental or economic issues.)