Okay, let's try not to let this spiral out into an all-out flame war.
So cheap energy is "stupid" in your opinion? The civilization you live in is built on the availability of cheap energy. Is that stupid as well?
With respect, Hydrogen, I think this is a disingenuous way to start an argument. Our civilization is the product of an innumerable amount of cultural legacies, some good, some bad and some that just need to change with the times. Valuing energy cheaply was a natural response to a world where there were few people and many resources, as was the case when the neoclassical philosophy that underpins a lot of our civilization took root. Of course, now that we have about 7 times the population and many more times the wealth (GDP) that we had in 1800, but with the same (or less, through extraction/degradation) natural resource base, something has got to give.
As you are well aware, pricing is a signal, and I would argue, the most robust one we have in a capitalist society. Price goes up, people buy less. Price goes down, people buy more. All I'm trying to argue in this thread is that if we want to change the amount of electricity people use, the most effective way to do so would be to adjust price of electricity to a point where people consciously think about how much they use. We can go beyond simply a charge per kWh to a tiered-pricing scheme, where if you use between (and I'm just using arbitrary figures here) 10,000 kWh to 15,000 kWh you pay X cents per kWh and if you use beyond 15,000 kWh you pay X + a cents/kWh for every additional kWh used beyond the base 15,000. While not an electricity example, I know that after Tucson, AZ instituted a tiered pricing scheme for water, per capita water use fell to about half what neighbouring Phoenix (where water prices are fixed and low) uses, to the point that if you view the satellite image for Phoenix it glows green from watered vegetation while Tucson bears the distinctive brown of xeriscaping.
you've failed to explain how the items you have listed should be priced.
It's nearly impossible to internalize the costs of environmental degradation until it's too late, so our lesson should be to tread carefully. Using a hypothetical example, nobody knows that destroying a salt water mangrove costs $10 million until the $10 million worth of shrimp formerly fished from the area disappears from the local economy. Similarly, the cost of a dam shouldn't just be the cost of building and maintaining a dam. Although we can't account for that explicitly, we should bear this in mind when building one. I'm not against building dams, per se, but if the net result of all this additional externalized environmental degradation and additional budgetary expenditure is that Quebeckers use twice as much energy to maintain a standard of living below the average Norwegian or Californian (who use half the electricity), that is wasteful and, by my reckoning, stupid.
Then again, why not support technological development that enables rather than artificial price fixing that disables?
Because you can't make a financial justification for technological development if you continue to subsidize the competition. Taking a cue from an example I know much better, the American city I live in clearly has a state-supported automobile subsidy: cheap gas, free parking, copious road space, planning that actively discourages density, etc. However, since it is a college town, it tries to appear progressive and therefore it started a free (because a fare would not be competitive) shuttle service that winds its way hopelessly around the cul de sacs and industrial parks of this very auto-centric city. The per-rider subsidy for this service is something that TTC commissioners would have an aneurysm over. The city is, in effect, double subsidizing driving and public transit at the same time and, predictably, the intended behavioural shift has not occurred: driving remains cheap and convenient, so it continues to be the mode of choice. The bright blue buses continue to drive around empty. This is precisely what you are proposing as an alternative to price adjustments. How much money do we have to pour into making alternative energy "viable" if conventional energy is so cheap? Why not make conventional energy pay for alternative energy through a Pigovian tax strategy?
