I wish I’d written this: an energy economist’s seven-point prescription for using energy more efficiently.
The piece is focused on Manhattan, but its advice makes sense just about everywhere. And you can tell that the author is an economist, rather than a technologist or a “futurist” or somesuch: all of his energy-saving prescriptions are about pricing. There’s no mention of R&D, or emerging technologies, or changing people’s mindsets about energy. Just ideas about how to change the way we pay for things.
His core idea seems sound: ensure that each of us pays, directly, for the true cost what we use — for the roads we drive on, for the parking spaces where our cars sit for 23 hours a day, for the true costs of the electricity and gasoline we consume — and we’ll use those resources more efficiently.
Obviously, this isn’t a complete list of what we’ll need to do to create a more sustainable energy system. It’s just start. But it’s a darn good start, I’d say.
