Claim: Global shift away from cars saves US$100 trillion, eliminates 1,700 MT of CO2 pollution

Yes, markx, you are on the right track. Pushing up energy/commodity prices only harm the poor. The rich can always purchase the latest and greatest energy-saving device. The poor must muddle through with less money in their pockets.
Here in the US, the cash for clunkers program (which incentivized the destruction of older cars) was a great boon for the car manufacturers selling new, efficient autos. Unfortunately, it drove up the used car market by drastically cutting the supply. Those too poor to buy new cars (whose price did not really change) had to pay 50-100% higher prices for used cars. Energy works much the same.
One more way that government planners harm the poor.

Harm the poor and line the pockets of the rich.
This reminds me of the way the textbook market has recently evolved. A decade or two ago, textbook publishers realized that they were getting creamed by the used textbook market. They’d publish a perfectly lovely textbook that cost them maybe $5 to print and another $3 to ship and sell it to a captive marketplace “required” to buy it once a professor or school adopted it for $150. They’d give the author(s) a buck or two of this and keep the rest, supporting 20 or 30 employees and reaping handsome divisional profits. In the old days, local bookstores would buy up used copies and a few students would end up going there instead of taking the time to find the used stores and maybe finding the right edition of the textbook needed for their class, but most students ended up buying a new textbook.
Then along came Amazon, the universal used bookstore. Anybody can find a used copy of any textbook that has been in print for any substantial length of time, because no matter where you sell your used book, the buyer puts the used copy up on Amazon in addition to putting it on their local shelves. Why not? The faster you turn the book, the more money you make, and Amazon’s cut is smaller than the overhead on shelf space.
Run the numbers. Supposed only 20% of the students who buy a new copy of a textbook in year one of its selection as a brand new book end up selling it when the class that requires it is finished. In year two, new textbook sales are down 20%. In year three, add another 16% In year four, you are selling around half the number of copies you did in year one, and by year five and on, between attrition as schools change textbooks and the used market, only 20%/year used sale/resale has choked your exorbitant profits down to a trickle. The art department has to lay people off. Marketing eats you alive — you are working as hard to resell books at zero profit that you’ve already sold as you are to sell new books that make you money. The editors who spent whole weeks proofing the textbook (but who you have to pay for years afterwards whether they are doing any work or not) are going hungry.
The solution? Textbook publishers now publish a new edition every 3 – 4 years, like clockwork. The new editions aren’t new, of course — that would be work, and expensive. They fix errata (and introduce new errata, of course). Sometimes the author can be persuaded to add or alter a section or two, although (as an author) that is a pain in the ass of monumental proportions once you’ve finished the original write, and you aren’t doing it because you think it necessary but because the publisher tells you it is necessary. But what they really do is scramble the problems at the end of the chapters, deleting a few and adding a few as well.
Oh. My. God. That’s all it takes to shut down the used book market. I can’t use the fourth edition problems I carefully picked and solved three years ago, because the fifth edition is now out and the fourth is no longer available except in the used book market, which isn’t large enough to cover my class reliably. I have to switch textbooks even though the old one was perfectly adequate, I have to go through and find the new numbers of the problems I assigned before and replace the ones that went away, all of my students have to spend $150/copy — more work and expense for everyone — all so that the textbook publishers can pay the staff of forty people other than the author who briefly worked on the textbook and continue to rake off enormous profits from its monopoly sale, without one single actual advantage to the student or professor attendant on the process.
The moral of the story (and yeah, there is a moral relevant to the discussion at hand, this isn’t ENTIRELY a disconnected rant off topic:-) — is that an unexpected series of developments, such as the invention of the internet, internet commerce, Amazon as an embodiment of internet commerce, and Amazon’s book reselling marketplace, had the unintended consequence of seriously hurting a previously lucrative business. Well, really dozens of previously lucrative business, but one in the case at hand. That business took immediate action not to improve their business model, not to increase the quality of what they sell, not to decrease the price of what they sell or live with smaller profits, but to preserve the precise model they already had and its high profits, by disimproving all aspects of the model that actually benefited the purchasers. The rapid pace of new editions have more errors, are less coherent (you have to periodically stir up things like order of presentation that were originally set the way they were for reasons by the authors), have to parallel online editions (and hence look a lot like web pages blown up in paper print, imagine that) and if anything, are even more expensive than before for shoddier binding and thinner paper (after all, these copies are designed not to last long in a used book market!).
But the free market is not done with innovation. At least a couple of companies specialize in reprinting out of copyright textbooks, or textbooks written by authors with minimal “fanciness” compared to the glossy, photo-rich, unreadable textbooks that are easy to market and nearly useless to the student. And then there is the internet and maturing e-book market, allowing anyone to write a book, turn it into an image, and sell it online for essentially zero marginal costs per copy sold. A textbook can be offset printed and sold for $30 and still make more money for an author than they would get per copy sold from the world’s largest publisher, and it can be sold on the internet for nothing but pure profit, split as a commission to e.g. Amazon as the seller and the author. Even if you pay for editing out of pocket, you don’t have to support the editors with royalties. In the long run, authors benefit a lot more selling books cheaply directly to the consumer (especially in electronic form) than they do messing with large publishers who simply take all of the profit and distribute it among dozens of middlemen including (most handsomely) themselves.
In a decade, we’re going to see the great winnowing of the publishing houses, just as we’ve already seen the great winnowing of the non-online bookstore. Not because the government mandated it, not to protect the consumer, but because consumers will protect themselves by choosing economically sound options, because producers will want to maximize their ROI by eliminating as many 10%-ers as possible from the supply chain, because the Internet is an enabling technology, because tablets and smartphones are univeral textbook readers as well as being essential already and familiar to the owner and (actually) comparatively cheap.
The really interesting thing to meditate upon (finally, the point) is how this process is going to make mince-meat out of the “plans to save the world” like the one above. Will they subsidize the massive construction of public transportation in marginal or frankly unprofitable markets, only to have even their tiny expected profits or actual losses magnified to the breaking point because somebody, I dunno, invents a storage battery that can run an electric car for 24 hours of highway driving between charges that take only 2 hours, or invents commercially viable thermonuclear fusion and instantly turns wind farms and solar collectors and coal plants, and fission plants, into so much expensive junk? Well, the coal plans and fission plants can probably be retrofit for fusion, but the wind farms? Not so much.
This is one of the major downsides of planned economies. Planning necessarily assumes that the future will be like the past, that when one estimates costs and benefits, the entire economic landscape underpinning those estimates will not suddenly rearrange. Of course past experience tells us that this is almost never the case. Our plans come with risk. One Henry Ford can come along and ruin your perfectly fabulous business selling horse coaches. The invention of the transistor makes your thriving business making and selling electronic tubes decay to almost nothing, the irreducible market for which only tubes will do. And don’t get me started about the computer. I used to have to type things on paper or write them by hand on paper, and could never have knocked off a few thousand words of essay in less than an hour, words that will actually be read by anywhere from tens to hundreds of humans.
Personally, I think the way it is going to work is this. The single event that has had a greater impact on CO_2 production in the US is the one nobody planned or expected — they discovery that natural gas is a gangbusters fuel for making electricity, and CH_4 makes two water molecules for every CO_2 molecule when you burn it, with almost zero side production of soot or pollutants other than trace CO that is undesirable and easily mostly eliminated with well-designed (read, “efficient”) burners. The oceans are chock full of methane — locked up in clathrates, trapped in ocean silt. The ground is chock full of methane, although naturally extracting it has a cost and risk associated with it so the very same people who would scream their heads off if their electricity went out for a week knee-jerk oppose mining the stuff that makes their electricity. Most of the other schemes for reducing CO_2 are so dumb that they aren’t worth the paper they are printed on, or are so politically unpopular that the lights will actually have to go out for people to realize what they are doing when they oppose it, e.g. nuclear fission power. Some are only marginally dumb — wind, for example — with at least some places coming down on both sides of the margin. In a few locations, wind generation might not be actively unprofitable, but it is at best marginally profitable and only a tiny change in the economics or technology or politics of power generation would be enough to make it utterly pointless.
Solar, OTOH, is often marginally profitable, and where it is, it is driving itself. It is rarely a huge win compared to power generated other ways, but it can honestly hold its own even without subsidy in many contexts and markets. It is also a technology that is still maturing, and as economies of scale improve top to bottom, as people make research breakthroughs in solar generation or associated support hardware (especially batteries) solar is capable of either suddenly shifting to no-brainer the most profitable choice for many locations or gradually getting there as manufacturing follows its past schedule of production cost reductions, which project out solar cells themselves at a cost of $0.25/watt (down from the current roughly $1/watt) in ten or fifteen years, possibly accompanied by a jump in relative efficiency and higher quality. At $0.25/watt, a 5000 watt panel set is only $1250. Even if converters and support hardware don’t come down commensurately, even allowing for harvesting only in sunny daylight time, solar would be a no-brainer with amortization times of as little as five or six years. Then there are the other game-changing technologies — LFTR and Fusion being the big two. D2 fusion, in particular, would enable the entire species to construct a steady state civilization capable of lasting millions of years, as there is simply no way to exhaust the available fusion fuel LFTR would enable at least thousands of years to solve the fusion problem and work out cost effective solar and storage and transport problems.
I think that this is the most likely scenario — that without doing anything deliberate to combat CO_2, we’ll peak in production in the next 20 years anyway, well short of 500 ppm, and at that point we’ll see how accurate the Bern model really is.
In far less than 100 years (however solar works out), our technology will be almost unrecognizably different and any solutions we carefully “plan” now for 2050 will be a complete joke when 2050 rolls around, if the past is any judge of the future. 100 years ago, there were still horses on the street and airplanes were made out of paper or cloth and wood. They had barely started to construct an electrical grid. But a war had just started that would change everything, but driving the rapid development of dozens of technologies and beginning the end of the rule of people by Kings that in the long run probably even justified the horrible cost in money and lives. By the end of the war, airplanes were everywhere, pilots were everywhere, huge companies existed that turned their manufacturing to consumers once the need for war material dried up. World War II was even more of a shock — it produced rockets, nuclear power, and a military-industrial complex that still, sadly, largely runs the political and economic world but that produces many benefits as it does so. In the last 50 years — my lifetime plus a hair — the entire world has been politically remodelled, the enemies of civilization of today were unheard of then, personal computers were invented, the internet was invented, racism has been systematically reduced, global wealth has skyrocketed, the sky was dirtied with smog and then cleaned again, we went to the moon and then walked away from it, and random acts of incredible violence compete with random acts of incredible kindness on a global stage as ancient world and worldviews crumble in the face of a world where access to global information is nearly universal and so cheap that everybody can afford it.
We haven’t even begun to see the full impact of the latter. The number of people with access to formal or informal education continues to skyrocket. Got a phone? Wikipedia is there to be read and learned from. In India, or central Africa, or in China, or in South America. In Iraq, in Syria, in Egypt. No wonder the Imams fear the cell phone. They let all of the young people they need to culturally indoctrinate see a whole world of people who are happy, healthy, wealthy and free, who live without fear of religious police. They can see, correctly, that the culture of their past and their most cherished beliefs will not survive the coming winnowing as their young make choices between the old, dark and evil, and the new, between freedom and slavery to an ideal that they do not entirely agree with administered by old men who fear change.
So I wouldn’t be surprised to be surprised, as the future unfolds, as long as I live to see it. My whole life has been one surprise after another, one improvement after another. Never have so many been so wealthy, so well-educated, or so free, all over the world. We are at this point extending what is perhaps the longest stretch in human history without a major “world spanning” war (where the “world” was smaller in the old days, so European wars and things like the Crusades count). Longest in a couple of hundred years, anyway. Most of the argument is how to divert what fraction of that “unprecedented” wealth into what projects for making the world a still better place to live. Personally, I think that it is the major energy companies themselves who, like the publishing companies, have openly encouraged climate catastrophism, because they reap by far the greatest benefits from combatting it, real or not. If we force “evil” coal-based energy companies to put scrubbers on their stacks, or to find some enormously expensive way of putting CO_2 back into the recently fracked ground, who pays for it? Not the coal miners — not until we don’t need their product at all. Making coal more expensive merely makes them more money for less work and production. Not the power companies. As their costs go up, they just raise prices to match, maintaining their marginal profits! So let’s see, would I rather make 10% marginal profit on a product that sells for $0.10 per KW/hour or $0.20 per KW/hour, in an inelastic market where the increase in cost will have almost no impact on human consumption? Let me see, decisions, decisions…
Energy companies are laughing all the way to the bank. They make something we cannot live without. They know it. We know it (although some idiots like to pretend otherwise or take measures that if implemented would force them to learn the reality of it, so far opposed by sane people who outnumber the insane 10 to 1). The comfort and benefits of civilization require cheap and plentiful energy, period. Those companies are perfectly happy to change the way they produce power in any way you like and make it as expensive as you like. They know you’ll keep buying electricity because it gets dark at night, hot in the daytime, cold in winter, and your tablets and television need feeding, because you like to keep your food cold and serve it hot, because you need to get to work and have to have light to see that work when you get there, because you like being able to buy clothing, toys, entertainments, necessities that are all produced with energy, ordered and sold with energy, delivered with energy, and sent on their merry way into garbage or recycling with energy. They know that even the most fundamental of needs — clean water, and a functional sewage system, and houses to keep the rain off of your head cost energy.
You want to make energy more expensive? They are happy to oblige. If you want them to build wind generation plants at twice the cost of any other technology, why not? They’ll just pass the cost on to you, and you’ll have to live with the warts or else pay them even more to cover the shortfall with their shrinking number of coal plants. Is osolar getting cheap enough to “cut out the middleman”? No it isn’t. They have economy of scale and the backing resources for when the sun doesn’t shine, and while they are happy enough for your roof to form part of their grid at your expense to save them some of the trouble of building large scale collector plants, they can always build and maintain those plants at twice the economy of scale that you can. Only the possibility of high density, cheap batteries might keep them up at night. Solar plants on household roofs that can store 100% of their unused production over weeks really would put them at risk, as houses could indeed go off of the grid in much of the world in that case. But then, they’d simply become the companies making and selling the batteries, or (like the publishing houses) they’d insure that the batteries had some flaw or limited shelf life for other reasons.
Grandiose plans are, therefore, almost generically unwise. If anything, we should seriously question the motives of not the sock-puppets who push climate catastrophism, but the hands inside those puppets, the hands that make those big, profitable plans. Because none of this is about making the world a better place, or a place with less of our lives devoted to paying huge companies for critical services and commodities (for better or worse).
It never was.
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