07-08-2010, 04:09 AM
If you want to kill the oil industry, raise the price of oil. Lowering the price of every other kind of energy is like trying to fly a plane by lowering the sky.
Here's some back-of-the-envelope math on trying to undercut oil by making energy cheaper.
A KWh of energy costs about 12 cents. Each American uses about 14,000 of them a year, for a total of $1,680 per capita per year. There are 300,000,000 Americans. That's 504 billion dollars in energy costs. Want to shave off one measly cent per KWh, lowering the price by only 9%? That's a subsidy of 42 billion dollars a year. That gets damned expensive damned fast.
However you achieve this, through loans, or whatever, money is hydraulic, and there is no free lunch. For X effect, you have to pay Y dollars, and if you can fiddle with the margins, you can't change the magnitudes.
-Jester
Here's some back-of-the-envelope math on trying to undercut oil by making energy cheaper.
A KWh of energy costs about 12 cents. Each American uses about 14,000 of them a year, for a total of $1,680 per capita per year. There are 300,000,000 Americans. That's 504 billion dollars in energy costs. Want to shave off one measly cent per KWh, lowering the price by only 9%? That's a subsidy of 42 billion dollars a year. That gets damned expensive damned fast.
However you achieve this, through loans, or whatever, money is hydraulic, and there is no free lunch. For X effect, you have to pay Y dollars, and if you can fiddle with the margins, you can't change the magnitudes.
Quote:But, to just engage in taxing carbon without having alternatives would be homicidal. Like taking the junkie off smack cold turkey, where we'd probably just die, or at least many of us would.The price of petrol in the UK is already over twice what it is in the US. No proposed carbon tax is that onerous. Yet, I don't hear of the mass deaths every year, not even up in Scotland where it's really cold. Must just be media bias, I guess.
-Jester