There are communities around the world where, after everyone switching to renewable energy sources, they no longer paid energy bills.
Right, but what was the alternative? Suppose I talked about communities where, once everyone bought into the buyer’s cooperative, food was free. (That is, they invested the capital accumulated up-front into a black box that was able to provide food for the community for twenty years.) A few things become apparent:
There must be some sort of limitation. Food could easily be free for me, because I can only eat so many calories a day, but not free for me and my closest million friends in the developing world, unless they also buy in. (For energy use, the relevant user is probably heavy export manufacturing.)
While this sounds great, whether or not it makes numerical sense is another question. How much would you be willing to pay now for free food for the rest of your life? There’s some number where it makes sense for you as a customer, even if that requires taking out a loan now, and there’s some number that makes sense for them as a supplier, but there’s no guarantee that your number will be bigger than their number. (It might cost them a million dollars, and only be worth $100k to you.)
That’s not to say these sorts of arrangements never make sense—they often do. But whether or not they make sense has to include some accounting to be serious. (I will note that Exxon is investing in renewable energy—whether as a PR move or a hedge against a foreseeable change in the future, I don’t know. But my impression is that once it does make sense to switch, they’ll switch. They’re in this business for the money, not because they like oil.)
It requires massive corporations to take advantage of economies of scale in order to get a profit from fossil fuels. The new ‘energy internet’ is far more efficient.
Whoa, hold on a second. Let’s take for granted that the energy internet exists as you describe it: an infrastructure investment that costs $1.2T but returns $2T. This requires even more massive corporations than the ones that we currently have, the largest of which typically make investments in the $B rather than the $T. (The largest publicly held corporation is worth about $0.5T.) The issue at stake isn’t efficiency, but scale.
That is, a company with $1.2T to invest in nuclear, or coal, or oil, or so on, might also be better than the current US energy supply, and this is just a generic statement of the form “if you invest more money into X, X will be better” and “if you make an organization larger, the amount it can invest in multiplicative improvements increases.” (In general, this is one of the reasons why I don’t think antitrust laws are all that useful; having people like Rockefeller or Carnegie sitting on metaphorical gold mines and interested in investing in efficiency to get even more profits seems like a good way to ramp up technological growth.)
Ok, so I’m not advocating a world where there is suddenly no business modal and everyone does whatever the hell they want.
I’m advocating (seriously, the book was really comprehensive and very good) the Commons as a governing scheme, wherein members share their resources and have general rules of self governance. This has happened around the world, and there are many isolated communities which have practised this governance model for centuries.
And in regards to your last point, I didn’t say that companies would fund anything like this. It would in fact be the people themselves. That is, utility companies will pass on the cost to their customers in the form of small hikes, and the rest will be absorbed by the government over about three decades.
Things like this (upgrade of the electricity grid) have happened before, and they were also public ally funded. For example, in America in the early 20th century, many people didn’t have electricity as they were living in rural areas. The then power companies didn’t want to invest in them, as they thought rural homes were too few, too spread out and lacking in purchasing power. As a result, the government attempted to do it themselves. And thus the rural electric administration was born.
Sadly, the government could not do provide power to rural America all be themselves. So what did they do? They encourage rural farmers to form electric co-operatives, and granted them low-interest loans along with technical and legal assistance.
The result? Rural America got electricity for about 40% of the cost of what the utility companies estimated it would cost. Massive economic benefit shortly followed.
Ok, so I’m not advocating a world where there is suddenly no business modal and everyone does whatever the hell they want.
Agreed! But this is why it’s important to keep “free” separate from “cheap.” At some point, someone will want something and not obtain it. The questions are what, why, and who. Capitalism seems like the best scheme for answering those questions, because of the various properties I discussed above (and some that I haven’t brought up yet).
One of the strengths of capitalism is that it allows voluntary organizations to spring in and out of being—and so people can form whatever cooperatives they want, to take advantage of any new ideas or differing economies of scale. When things move from ‘expensive’ to ‘cheap,’ the sorts of organizations that exist around those things change accordingly.
Government is useful primarily for involuntary organizations—which have their benefits, but also their drawbacks, and should be employed with caution. It seems very likely to be proper to enforce nonviolence on the population through violent means, while much less likely to be proper to enforce a particular purchase or behavior on the population through violent means. But there are other purchases or behaviors that it may be proper to enforce, and so on.
That’s why I’m advocating the commons as an alternate to capitalism. I mean, capitalism has done a lot of good, but it has also done a lot of bad. Or more accurately, it has allowed a lot of bad things to happen. I would still prefer a capitalist world to the old hunter gather one, or a Marxist society. But I just think that the Commons represents a good, or maybe even better, alternative.
I’ve added a few links to the main discussion post. I recommend them because they will probably get the idea of the commons across way better than I can.
Right, but what was the alternative? Suppose I talked about communities where, once everyone bought into the buyer’s cooperative, food was free. (That is, they invested the capital accumulated up-front into a black box that was able to provide food for the community for twenty years.) A few things become apparent:
There must be some sort of limitation. Food could easily be free for me, because I can only eat so many calories a day, but not free for me and my closest million friends in the developing world, unless they also buy in. (For energy use, the relevant user is probably heavy export manufacturing.)
While this sounds great, whether or not it makes numerical sense is another question. How much would you be willing to pay now for free food for the rest of your life? There’s some number where it makes sense for you as a customer, even if that requires taking out a loan now, and there’s some number that makes sense for them as a supplier, but there’s no guarantee that your number will be bigger than their number. (It might cost them a million dollars, and only be worth $100k to you.)
That’s not to say these sorts of arrangements never make sense—they often do. But whether or not they make sense has to include some accounting to be serious. (I will note that Exxon is investing in renewable energy—whether as a PR move or a hedge against a foreseeable change in the future, I don’t know. But my impression is that once it does make sense to switch, they’ll switch. They’re in this business for the money, not because they like oil.)
Whoa, hold on a second. Let’s take for granted that the energy internet exists as you describe it: an infrastructure investment that costs $1.2T but returns $2T. This requires even more massive corporations than the ones that we currently have, the largest of which typically make investments in the $B rather than the $T. (The largest publicly held corporation is worth about $0.5T.) The issue at stake isn’t efficiency, but scale.
That is, a company with $1.2T to invest in nuclear, or coal, or oil, or so on, might also be better than the current US energy supply, and this is just a generic statement of the form “if you invest more money into X, X will be better” and “if you make an organization larger, the amount it can invest in multiplicative improvements increases.” (In general, this is one of the reasons why I don’t think antitrust laws are all that useful; having people like Rockefeller or Carnegie sitting on metaphorical gold mines and interested in investing in efficiency to get even more profits seems like a good way to ramp up technological growth.)
Ok, so I’m not advocating a world where there is suddenly no business modal and everyone does whatever the hell they want.
I’m advocating (seriously, the book was really comprehensive and very good) the Commons as a governing scheme, wherein members share their resources and have general rules of self governance. This has happened around the world, and there are many isolated communities which have practised this governance model for centuries.
And in regards to your last point, I didn’t say that companies would fund anything like this. It would in fact be the people themselves. That is, utility companies will pass on the cost to their customers in the form of small hikes, and the rest will be absorbed by the government over about three decades.
Things like this (upgrade of the electricity grid) have happened before, and they were also public ally funded. For example, in America in the early 20th century, many people didn’t have electricity as they were living in rural areas. The then power companies didn’t want to invest in them, as they thought rural homes were too few, too spread out and lacking in purchasing power. As a result, the government attempted to do it themselves. And thus the rural electric administration was born.
Sadly, the government could not do provide power to rural America all be themselves. So what did they do? They encourage rural farmers to form electric co-operatives, and granted them low-interest loans along with technical and legal assistance.
The result? Rural America got electricity for about 40% of the cost of what the utility companies estimated it would cost. Massive economic benefit shortly followed.
Agreed! But this is why it’s important to keep “free” separate from “cheap.” At some point, someone will want something and not obtain it. The questions are what, why, and who. Capitalism seems like the best scheme for answering those questions, because of the various properties I discussed above (and some that I haven’t brought up yet).
One of the strengths of capitalism is that it allows voluntary organizations to spring in and out of being—and so people can form whatever cooperatives they want, to take advantage of any new ideas or differing economies of scale. When things move from ‘expensive’ to ‘cheap,’ the sorts of organizations that exist around those things change accordingly.
Government is useful primarily for involuntary organizations—which have their benefits, but also their drawbacks, and should be employed with caution. It seems very likely to be proper to enforce nonviolence on the population through violent means, while much less likely to be proper to enforce a particular purchase or behavior on the population through violent means. But there are other purchases or behaviors that it may be proper to enforce, and so on.
That’s why I’m advocating the commons as an alternate to capitalism. I mean, capitalism has done a lot of good, but it has also done a lot of bad. Or more accurately, it has allowed a lot of bad things to happen. I would still prefer a capitalist world to the old hunter gather one, or a Marxist society. But I just think that the Commons represents a good, or maybe even better, alternative.
I’ve added a few links to the main discussion post. I recommend them because they will probably get the idea of the commons across way better than I can.