However, I take issue with his incredulity at the fact that these policies have not been implemented.
There's a great line in the movie Layer Cake (see it if you haven't, holy shit it's good), where an elder... ahem... legitimate businessman says to one of his top underlings, "You know why people like you can't leave this business? Because you make too much money for people like me."
Shoot. The line is in the trailer.
That philosophy carries over quite well to the world of politics. No government is going to abandon it's primary supplier of funding and support (read: corporate lobbyists) in order to help people cut energy costs/save the world from an untimely demise.
Long story short, the government isn't going to eliminate inefficient buildings, because they make too much money for utility companies.
Now, people like to throw around the word corporations as if it were synonymous with Lord Sauron's all seeing eye, myself included. But the truth is, we live in a culture based on one thing: Monies. Papes. Scrilla. Chedda. Call it what you will, it sure as hell makes the world go round. And corporations are money making machines. How do you think Portland General Electric would react if it's profits were promptly cut to zero? Well, they ain't gon' like it.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...This is where I find Nordhaus and Shellenberger's (Nordy 'n' Shellyberg if you ain't got the time) arguments intriguing. A key point of their thesis is that, in order to change our structure of energy supply, we have to change our structure of power supply. As in, our structure of money supply, because we all remember the formula for success that rap radio has ingrained in us, Money = Power.
Essentially, change how the people who control government (hint: it's not politicians) get their money, and they will actively seek ways to make more money through those means.
If the government hires power utility providers to retrofit every home in the U.S. to be energy productive, promising said companies access to the net energy profit, and allowing them to run various public utilities with it, you have a cyclical, sustainable, and (most importantly) profitable system of energy supply. People already pay monthly energy bills, just rename that cost "efficiency maintenance fees" and energy companies aren't losing any profit.
On top of that, people already have no problem letting private contractors and cable company employees into their homes to tinker with shit, so I can't imagine them having a problem with the electric company doing it.
In summation: Why isn't this redesigning of energy production being implemented? Simple. Because no one stands to make money from it. Change that, and you might change the concept's status.
No comments:
Post a Comment