On Sep 1, 2008, at 10:58 AM, Gary Nunn wrote: > Are high gas prices a necessary evil to force technological > advancement?
They shouldn't be, and in an economy and social/cultural framework that cultivated proactive thinking at least in the majority, they wouldn't be. The problem is that the existing paradigm tends to go ahead with business as usual until it becomes totally unsustainable, *then* start developing technologies to deal with the crisis, usually when it's way too late and the development starts out way down the declining backside of the curve. This is characteristic of virtually every level of human organization. (And all too often, when the "thinking people" do propose proactive ways to avoid future crises, they're branded as "conspiracy theorists" or "fringe elements" and discredited .. until it turns out that they were right all along. I've said before that this country has a very strong anti-science and anti-knowledge streak in its mainstream culture.) > I do my share of complaining about gas prices, especially when I sit > in > almost daily traffic jams burning up that $4.00 a gallon fuel. > However, In a > debate with my daughter, I brought up the question of, without > sufficient > motivation, would anyone be aggressively looking for alternative fuel > sources? Global Warming certainly would not cause sufficient > motivation. For the majority of people, "global warming" is a "someday it might happen" thing that they don't see happening in their lifetimes, and a) see as a much lower priority than paying the bills, buying groceries, and keeping the kids in school, along with other day-to-day immediate realities; and b) feel essentially impotent, on some levels at least, to do anything about. It's not a "right here, right now" perception to most people, because most people don't watch the horizon as closely as much as many of us here do. They either trust "the smart people" to "fix it somehow" before it becomes a crisis, or they don't believe (and in some cases, actively disbelieve!) that it's a real problem at all. This generally tends to play into the "keep doing what we're doing until something breaks and then try to fix it" tendency of the culture as a whole. > Nothing motivates the masses more that money. If we're still buying > $1.50 a > gallon gas at the pumps, why would anyone be motivated to get rid of > that > Hummer getting 10 miles per gallon (on a good day!) and find more > efficient > and sustainable fuel sources? Why would car manufacturers do the > research > and development to create vehicles with higher fuel efficiency > unless they > have to? The manufacturers are in fact actively resisting any development of alternate-energy technology that exists right now, and in one rather well-documented case, a major oil company and a major auto manufacturer own rights to patents for an alternate-energy technology that was in fact on the road in modest numbers in CA in the 1990's, patents they refuse to license to anyone even hinting at wanting to build commuter-scale highway-capable electric cars. (Google any combination of Chevron, Cobasys, Ovonics, NiMH, and EV-95 for a wealth of documentation on this.) They're doing this, in part, because they are acutely aware that their profitability has historically been very closely tied to the oil and gasoline energy economy (ignoring the fact that their current decline, and danger of bankruptcy and worse things, is also closely tied to that same economy), and in part because they're all locked in a sort of suboptimal Nash equilibrium where none of them wants to incur the R&D costs of opening up the market to commuter-scale EV"s just to see all of their competitors cash in on that investment. As long as the one who moves first is the loser in the short term, nobody will move first, until some external force (like a ZEV mandate with teeth in it that they can't sabotage in back room deals) forces them to do so .. and once BEV's that are suitable for the average daily commute (plus a sigma or two) and the infrastructure to support them are in place in at least a critical mass, the market *will* shift for good. The demand is definitely there. But it all comes down to the fact that it's not possible to push changes like this without understanding the micro-, mes0- and macroeconomics of the status quo enough to know where and when to push .. and having had a presidential administration for the past 8 years that has had no inclination to do so, let alone enough understanding of the market forces to do it even if they wanted to, hasn 't helped .. "This language proposes a new doctrine for the use of force, that we use force whenever we see an injustice that we want to correct. Like Mother Teresa with first strike capability." -- Toby Ziegler _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
