Something makes humans vulnerable to what I'll call "the quick-fix scam." Our desire for get-rich quick schemes is well documented: Why should I save when I can retire on my Internet stock investments?
And something happens to a lot of otherwise intelligent people when they're faced with, for example, bogus advice about dieting. If my doctor tells me that I have to eat less and exercise more, I'll dismiss him with sincere promises and take no further action. But if a skimpily clad starlet in a supermarket magazine explains that eliminating carbohydrates from her diet has made her look young and beautiful, you can be sure that I won’t be alone in following her advice, at least for a while. (Someone once pointed out that the young and beautiful woman is young and beautiful because she’s young and beautiful, but that’s a topic for another day).
Then there are the twin crises of energy and climate change. The energy crisis is the rising price of energy and our inability to safely keep up with growing demand. The climate change crisis results from the build-up of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, that is rapidly altering the climate. If the accepted scientific models are right, the results will be disastrous for millions of people in coming years. There is a common element to these crises: consumption of oil, coal and gas.
What do we do when the times demand hard choices and painful action? Why, we fantasize, of course.
Worried about your gas guzzler‘s damaging impact? Why not trade it in for a “water-powered car.” Or hey, why not a “biodiesel” Hummer!
A few years ago, I was editing a column by a fairly well-known economics journalist, a man with a Ph.D. from America’s most prestigious university. With the deadline breathing down my neck, I realized that the entire premise of the column was flawed. He had breezily claimed that practically all the technology existed to create the so-called “hydrogen economy” and how this would solve all of our energy problems.
I called him and pointed out that to obtain the hydrogen needed to operate fuel cells (the building blocks of this hydrogen El Dorado), current technology requires that we burn oil, coal or gas to power electrolysis, the process by which we separate hydrogen from the oxygen in water. And not only that, we get LESS energy from the hydrogen that we derive this way than we have to burn in order to obtain it. His response was simply to assume the problem away, in the time-tested fashion of economists, with a vague reference to an unproven technology for obtaining hydrogen more easily than is currently possible, one that no doubt will be available very soon. Right.
Then there is the eternal siren call of nuclear power. Like the stock market, the housing bubble, Vietnam-Iraq, every generation must learn anew the lessons of its elders. Let’s just hope that the dangers of nuclear power are remembered without a horrifying accident.
It is with this in mind that I propose a few simple rules for evaluating energy policies:
1) Reducing energy waste presents the easiest target for cutting both fuel consumption and the production of carbon dioxide and other pollutants. The use of cars by individuals for transportation is extraordinarily inefficient and has led to a developed-world social model based around extremely inefficient arrangements that is rapidly spreading to the rest of the planet. So any serious plan must aim first at getting millions of vehicles off of the world’s roads and keeping them off, while sharply raising the efficiency of those that remain. Sorry.
2) If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Most of the really half-baked ideas -- replacing petroleum with “biodiesel,” ethanol from corn, sequestering carbon dioxide underground, etc. -- do not to stand up to any serious scrutiny. The truly "green" fixes -- solar and wind power -- laudable as they may be, are largely irrelevant, considering the growth in petroleum demand; that is, they may moderate demand growth, to some extent, but they will not seriously affect the current demand for oil and thus the output of pollutants, which are, after all, the problems.
3) We can’t count on technology to bail us out. Not in the short run, not in the long run. Of course, disruptive innovation in energy technology is not impossible, but the laws of physics cannot be broken, and prudence dictates that we assume that most advances will be incremental. Intelligent planning should consider technological improvement, but it must focus on what is available TODAY if it is to be useful.
4) Hydrogen is hype.
5) Finally, there’s no free lunch. Any plan that claims to solve the energy-environment problem but doesn’t accept that doing so will cause traumatic dislocation -- that is, severe economic distress, affecting the livelihoods of tens of millions of people around the world -- cannot be taken seriously.
Now,doesn't that make you feel better?
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Between quick fix and making money scams that began your post, I find immediate reason in the notion that any solution that we seek to these issues will -- if only because of the nature of politics and human nature -- need to keep economics formally involved in the equation. With the combination of increasingly frequent earthly disasters -- that would appear to be the result of the climate changes -- and the rising cost of fuels, there may be a serendipitous confluence of reasons to really get our global acts together and find a solution to lowering energy consumption and, simultaneously, reducing the pollution. Naturally, on the topic of beautiful women, I suppose we also need to talk bio-products that are paraben free.
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