The Economics of Alternative Energy Development

The challenge, and it must be said, opportunity posed by climate change is how networked the problem is.



- Evolution of the shares of energy sources in global primary energy consumption, as trajectories

Since we mastered fire, human civilization has been dependent on the ability to create and deliver energy where we wanted it.

So, energy policy. She's a doozy. As a rocket scientist friend of mine* often says, "It ain't rocket science, but then again rocket science isn't really that hard."

Do we know what we want energy policy to do? We'll be exploring that in weeks ahead, but as a kick-off to the energy policy inquiry I give you this analysis thus far from The Big Picture The Costanza Energy Policy: 25 Ways to Drive Oil to $150 -

for the past 3 decades, we've had a George Costanza Energy policy -- every decision we have made as a country has worked to drive energy prices higher. Had we made the opposite decisions, Crude Oil prices would be much lower than they are today ($130.17 as I type this).

Now our concern is less with the price of oil than the use of oil. But they are interconnected.

[M]arkets develop solutions only AFTER the economics of it are feasible. This means we are starting R&D with Oil at previously unthinkable levels. Imagine if we had some form of energy leadership 10 or 20 years ago when Oil was $8.

And that is where the rocket science comes in. The hard part isn't building the rocket to the moon. The hard part is convincing people to decide to do it.


*Rob Tuluie is a very close friend of a very close friend which takes up a lot of space to write, so i leave it in the footnote.