Originally Posted by
wiggin
I really don't want to derail the OP much further, but a quick point here:
Yes, the US has recently approved a few nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, they are generally only being considered in the heavily regulated electricity markets of the southeast. Even there, cost have been spiraling out of control. The Economist had a nice special report on this a short while ago, and it was pretty bleak on the fate of nuclear power in the West, almost entirely due to cost considerations. The US has a fairly significant chunk of installed nuclear power, but it's unlikely we'll ever come close to significantly increasing our capacity.
That being said, I'm not sure that a centrally managed transition is always the best way to run things, either. My biggest complaint with such systems (even when done indirectly through subsidies) is that it presupposes that the government knows which future technology is the best one to develop as an alternative to a current (buggy) one. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case; they may have a solution, but it's almost certainly not the solution. I think a much better way to deal with this problem is to change the market so that different energy prices accurately reflect the true costs - environmental, social, political - of using it. What we're dealing with here is fundamentally a question of externalities, and I have confidence that appropriately priced externalities could easily change market behavior in a good way without imposing a top-down solution.
This may lead me to a tangential take on the thread topic itself. I don't want to get mired in questions of ALEC or lobbying groups - there are issues there, no doubt, but teasing them out is not my area of expertise. But I would like to reiterate what I've said to Nessie before. I don't have some belief in a magical invisible hand of the market which will always result in the best outcome for society (in that I don't believe that economic definitions of 'efficiency' are remotely applicable to broader society). But I do think that markets are a very powerful tool to change human behavior. Accurate pricing is absolutely critical, of course, which is why I favor regulators trying to eliminate externalities as much as possible. In general, though, both scarcity and unintended side-effects of a given product should drive up prices, resulting in a market-driven search for better and overall cheaper alternatives. A whole lot of ideas will get tried out and discarded, but the best ones will become the new gold standard. That's how the world gets to be a better place.
I don't think that one needs to be a Malthusian to be concerned with the issue of scarcity - energy or otherwise - in today's world. It's clear that we will face unprecedented challenges in the next century as the global population peaks in the 9-10 billion range, and as our global per capita consumption dramatically increases through development. I don't want to be a starry-eyed optimist and assume that all problems will magically disappear with a technological panacea, or that dealing with these problems might not get messy. But I think that to assume we'd descend into the depths of genocide or a global resource war is unnecessarily pessimistic. Our world has gotten so much better for those living in it, even as our demands on food, energy, and resources has reached unprecedented peaks. I think we can muddle through, though it won't always be pretty.
When I hear criticisms of 'democracy' as being too short-sighted to adequately deal with complex problems, what I really hear is a criticism of freedom - free choice/self determination, free markets, etc. I'm not trying to say that's a bad thing (or use it as a debate tactic to paint you as anti-freedom) - lots of societies (including our own) recognize that too much freedom can sometimes be a bad thing. In fact, one might argue that anarchy or a libertarian ideal might be a better representation of freedom than modern democracies (though I'd disagree). But on the balance, I generally think that the free actions of millions of people can, in aggregate, result in an improvement over a totalitarian solution imposed from above. Yes, some of those individuals will make bad decisions. Yet people are incredibly creative, and if we give them an opportunity to solve a problem on their own (by making it their problem in the first place), they will come up with a plethora of solutions that will in aggregate be far more effective than one or two implemented by a planning committee. The role of government, then, is not to foresee every problem and fix it - because frankly that won't work for most democracies with rapid turnover of elected officials. No, the role of government is to appropriately guide the market through regulation and pricing to come up with its own solutions.
