“‘People are willing to pay a premium for environmental goods,’ Mr. Dables said. “It’s one thing to buy a box of soap and pay 20 percent more; I don’t know anyone who wants to pay 20 percent more for a car.”
It has taken a basket of mandates and subsidies to get battery-driven vehicles (EVs) on the road in the last decade. Start with a $7,500 per vehicle tax credit. Continue with automobile dealers having to get credits from electrics to meet their corporate average fuel economy standards (CAFE) obligations. Add-in never-ending taxpayer-financed R&D from the US Department of Energy and a lot of jawboning by the Presidents from Clinton to Obama to Biden.
Think back to the 1990s, when natural gas vehicles and methanol-powered vehicles were in play. Electric vehicles had interest too.…
Continue ReadingEd. Note: Jim Clarkson is a soft-spoken everyday man who has experienced first-hand the ins-and-outs of crony public-utility regulation, first as the energy manager at a large industrial user and more recently as an energy procurement/installation consultant. Clarkson, a classical liberal, has also been instrumental in the development of the Institute for Energy Research (IER) as a free-market education and advocacy organization.
… Continue Reading“A Federal employee asked what I did and why I was on the Board…. I airily waved at the group and said: ‘I’m the only one here making an honest living.’ That didn’t go over very well. I shouldn’t have said it, but after over 50 years of observing state utility regulation, it still upsets me to see smart young people devoted to limiting freedom and prosperity when they could be doing something useful.”
“In business and economic terms, what is physically ‘worse’ [with climate] today is actually better [than in the past]. Thus I would argue that social justice demands affordable A/C for many more or all rather than mitigation policies that make A/C less affordable or unaffordable.”
This exchange was with Susan Krumdieck, “Professor, Author and Leader in Energy Transition Engineering.” While I have criticized her approach to “transition engineering” as uneconomic in a true marketplace and thus government-driven, I appreciate her polite engagement toward mutual learning.
Our latest exchange began with her post comment:
Thanks everyone for sharing the news about the extreme weather. But I feel like we are on a run-away train. Here is a metaphor story. Maybe it will help.
Her article, “We Are All on Board a Speeding Train,” (August 17, 2020) followed.…
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