How many SPSes for $87 billion ?

>>2. Economically speaking, energy efficiency is a much better economic
>>investment than energy production. This site has lots on this topic:
>> http://www.rmi.org
>> http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid17.php

> Economically speaking it is ALWAYS better to produce more than to
> conserve. In a ecnomonically rational choice, if the costs are
> identical producing more will make everyone better off. In fact it can
> be shown that even if the cost of production is greater than
> conservation, by the macro multiplier effect it is still economically
> better to produce more.
>
> BTW the above quoted statement shows the illogical arguments of many
> environmentalists. It shows the following fallacies:
> [snip comments on types of argument issues]

Bill-

You have some good general points on language and argument, especially
about loose use of language in referring to what model of economics is
implied. I appreciate you taking the time to outline them, which also
inspired me to look at this page:
http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/index.htm
I say, with all sincerity, please feel free to do that with anything I
post (assuming your characterizations are generally correct). I
certainly learned something from your comments.

I do feel in the overall thread of a month or so long debate that there
was a little more to the entire debate than what you outline by focusing
on this one statement out of context many months later (e.g. I did talk
about production from earth based renewables, especially rooftop PV),
but that does not make your specific logical criticisms of that
statement necessarily invalid (though I think the context might affect
some of them).

Also "environmentalist" is a pretty broad brush (what sort do you mean,
tree hugger, Kashi eater, vegetarian, Biodiesel hybrid with plug in
recharging owner wannabe, fluorescent light bulb user, PV panel
purchaser, or forest steward, etc.?) and seems implicitly "Attacking the
Person" or "Prejudicial Language" to me given the posting membership of
this forum and how you used it. :-)

Having said all that, economically speaking (in terms of GDP), it is
ALWAYS better if people have a car accident on the way home from work.
(Well, I'm sure one could invent a contrived scenario when it wasn't, so
I should probably say "almost always").

And I don't quite mean that as flippant joke -- the GDP goes up every
time a car accident happens -- all the economic activity caused by
hospital visits, new car production, and so on. In the movie the "Fifth
Element" there is a cute little scene related to that in Zorg's office.
That seems to be the thing you are implying in your comment about
"multiplier" effects.

But society is (generally) still worse off for every car accident. And
so is the car's driver, who endures pain and suffering and stress and
maybe a lot worse even if they are fully insured. In a similar fashion,
society is worse off in many ways for every barrel of oil consumed or
ton of coal burned in terms of CO2 production and other pollution
(relative to less polluting alternatives like renewables or energy
efficiency) as well as related political corruption and wealth
centralization. Those external costs are often not paid by the energy
producer or even the end user; they are paid for by our current society
and future societies.

There are people who work on alternative measures than GDP to look at
the true health and productivity of a civilization and its life support
systems. For one example, see:
http://www.rprogress.org/newprojects/gpi/index.shtml
There you can see a graph where the GDP curve goes up while the GPI
(Genuine Progress Indicator) goes down. For a discussion of some others
and why they are important, see:
http://www.consultmcgregor.com/PDFs/GDP%20and%20GPI.pdf
But in short, GDP does not cover things like (from that paper):
1. health
2. infant mortality
3. morbidity
4. suicide rates
5. crime
6. poverty
7. environmental health/decay and destruction of the natural environment
8. infrastructure such as highways and bridges
9. family breakdown
10. loss of leisure time
11. cost of commuting to work
12. lack of civility in communities
13. lack of concern for future generations
14. income gap (women/men; poor/wealthy)

One biggest issue I have with your comment may be that when I wrote
"energy efficiency" as in "doing more with less" you read "conservation"
as in just "doing less with less". As an aside, as great a person as I
think he is, if President Jimmy Carter had just talked about increasing
energy efficiency through advanced technology instead of wearing a
sweater and talking about turning down thermostats during his famous (or
infamous) energy conservation speech, the USA might have been a lot
better off today. :-) Energy efficiency (e.g. properly done home
superinsulation) has much greater techno-geek appeal, as well as often
being profitable. Now I myself may have been guilty about loose
terminology somewhere in that long discussion (though not in the quote
you used) and in general people often use "conservation" to include
energy efficiency (since efficiency does conserve energy), so it is an
easy confusion to make. And to be clear, personally I am also generally
pro conservation, as in voluntary simplicity and doing less with less
when reasonable,
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=voluntary+simplicity
because it frees up time and resources for other things and reduces
external costs as an ethical actor in society. But nonetheless, in the
quote above, I was talking "energy efficiency", not "energy conservation".

Anyway, I'd suggest you should reevaluate your economics comment on
multiplier effects etc. in terms of "efficiency" and see if it still
makes sense. Are you saying it is a bad thing economically when
computers get ten times faster using the same amount of silicon or when
factories can turn out twice as many cars using the same amount of
labor? Even using classical academic economics related to GDP, I think
your argument against efficiency may not hold, since presumably the
money can be spent elsewhere. So, you may be engaging in a "Straw Man"
(or is is "False Analogy"?) fallacy there as well. See also, for example:
http://www.economist.com/opinion/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID!55405
"During the dark days following the Arab embargo, when most oil
economists were convinced that energy use and economic growth had to
grow in harness, Mr Lovins insisted that demand-side measures could save
the day. In a famous article published in Foreign Affairs in 1976, he
argued that America could pursue a "soft path" that would remove the
link between energy guzzling and GDP growth. He was widely mocked by the
energy industry and mainstream economists at the time, but history has
shown him to have been right (see chart 2). ... The most important, and
most controversial, of America's demand-side measures is the Corporate
Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) law. As a result of this measure, the
average fuel efficiency of new American-made cars rose by over
two-fifths from 1978 to 1987. From 1977 to 1985, America's GDP rose by
27%, but its oil use dropped 17% by volume. The volume of America's net
oil imports fell by nearly 50% during that time. Mr Lovins argues that
the dramatic drop in oil intensity of the American economy "broke OPEC's
pricing power for a decade". The cartel fell into disarray in the late
1980s, and the world enjoyed relatively low and stable oil prices for
much of the 1990s. Demand-side measures like CAFE did help check the
cartel's power for some time. However, the automobile industry hates the
law and for the past few years has managed to thwart efforts by some in
Congress to raise the standards and to close a loophole that exempts
trucks and sport-utility vehicles (SUVs). As a result, America has
started to return to its gas-guzzling ways of the past. The average fuel
efficiency of American vehicles has been near a 20-year low for the past
two years."

By the way, Amory Lovins is now often asked by big utilities to help
them think through their policies. As mentioned above, he has been right
before and kept up his work anyway for over thirty years despite being
ridiculed by people later proved wrong, also mentioned here:
And I challenge you to point out anything significant on the RMI site
that is factually in error. I also challenge you to show that 90% of
energy efficiency retrofits have failed in the last few years.(*)
Which logical fallacy is it to spread FUD claiming "Ad Verecundiam" etc.
about someone who has in the past genuinely helped the USA with his
unorthodox (but correct) reasoning and continues to do so? :-)

(*) I'll admit early attempts to superinsulate homes a few decades ago
sometimes had problems, but those issues are much better understood now
and current approaches work much better; see for example:
http://www.hhinst.com/Artcanadaconf.html
http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/popup/hhtoronto/here.htm

As an aside, I feel conventional academic economics is obsolete; see for
inspiration:
"The Abolition of Work -- by Blob Black"
http://www.deoxy.org/endwork.htm
or James P. Hogan's novels, like:
"Voyage from Yesteryear"
http://jamesphogan.com/books/voyage/baen99/titlepage.shtml
or what one person pointed on this list (Valens? Tango?) pointed me to:
"post-autistic economics network"
http://www.paecon.net/
so maybe I get a little sloppy there in my language trying to rush
through the obsolete part. :-)

My own model (in flux, but mostly as it stands now) is more that there
are the equivalent of physical patterns (including people and tools and
energy flows and trees) out there [level one?], and there are decision
makers emerging from that level (including human individual
consciousnesses and thermostats) which affect how resources are
transformed or moved [level two?], and out of the decision makers
interacting emerges various systems of assumptions (leading to things
like fiat currencies or economic textbooks or internet standards like
HTML, or related meaningful communications -- meaningful within those
systems, that is) [level three?]. Conventional economics is just one set
of emergent assumptions on level three. There are many other models
possible and desirable. A lot of conventional economics is essentially
about rationing. Decision makers may well decide to ration things, and
there are all sorts of ways to do that, from using generalized ration
tokens like fiat dollars or gold coins to having decision makers
rationing each specific commodity by some negotiated guidelines and
involving ration tokens or not. Eventually, in a world with nanotech
replicators and cheap PV (SSPS or ground based), decision makers (or
networks of decision makers) may decide that some things like food,
shelter, clothing, entertainment, health care, personal transport, and
so on are so easily produced as to be not worth rationing, like we
generally don't ration oxygen today -- green plants just keep producing
more of it from water and CO2 with very little intervention. At that
point, there will likely be plenty of people with free time and ready
access to enough unrationed materials and energy to build space
settlements. A online sci-fi story related to the development of such a
world:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

All the best.

--Paul Fernhout