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By your logic, we should have not banned CFCs in household goods but instead made them more expensive. The reason for why we want to have energy efficiencies i
by afreak 13y ago
By your logic, we should have not banned CFCs in household goods but instead made them more expensive.
The reason for why we want to have energy efficiencies is simply because we only have to produce so much more electricity to power everything else. We have not reached a point where nuclear, solar, or wind is cheaper by the MW than coal and as a result we'll continue to build those for the foreseeable future. Banning inefficient and obsolete light bulbs will prevent us from needing to burn more coal and other harmful fuels.
If we didn't have this problem with electricity generation then banning something may become less desirable.
- tedunangst 13y agoBy your logic, we should have not banned CFCs in household goods but instead made them more expensive. Lots of people would agree with that or the point in general that financial penalties work better. Legislation should mandate results, not dictate methods.
- mjn 13y agoAre there any studies on how effective each method is? It seems fairly complex, depending on how good the methods being dictated are, how price-sensitive consumers are (and how well-informed about what costs/saves money), costs of switching, in some cases economies of scale, etc. The conventional wisdom here (Denmark) has been that a mixture of the two achieves best results: a high tax on energy to provide an across-the-board untargeted price incentive, plus specific targeted regulations aiming at cutting out the largest sources of inefficiency and encouraging economies of scale in more efficient technologies. So for example district heating is now mandatory if you're in an area where it's available (no furnaces in new construction), and this seems to have been quite effective in increasing its adoption, which in turn makes it easier to build efficient district-heating networks and cogenerating power plants, since there is a dense customer base.
- tedunangst 13y agoI don't know specifically. I do know that all of the "alternate fuel" tax credits are a giant scam. How does spraying kerosene on coal make it clean? No clue, but the government will pay you to do it if you say it's alternative.
- gaadd33 13y agoCouldn't it make it cleaner by promoting more complete combustion in power plants thereby reducing particulate emissions?
- tedunangst 13y agoI suppose anything is possible. The point is it would be better for the government to mandate results (lower emissions, which can be measured) than methods (spray kerosene on coal and hope it does something useful).
- Dylan16807 13y agoCFC deplete a limited resource. Electricity doesn't inherently do that. If you're in charge of the laws, you can make non-polluting energy cheapest and do far more good than coming at the issue from the side by legislating light bulbs. Or you could be really direct and make a law against powering incandescent bulbs on coal power, letting everyone choose if they want to buy some renewable/nuclear energy for their wasteful bulbs.
- gjm11 13y ago> Electricity doesn't inherently do that. No, but for the moment it does actually do that. And you can change what sort of light bulbs people use faster than you can change your large-scale power generation technology. (I do agree that making environmentally-better energy cheaper is likely a more powerful way of reducing the environmental cost of electricity use than telling everyone to stop using incandescent bulbs. But "X is better than Y" is a reason for doing X, not necessarily a reason for not doing Y.) > a law against powering incandescent bulbs on coal power Enforcing that one would be an interesting challenge. A law that says "no selling incandescent bulbs" is rather easier to enforce.