gluten-free dairy-free grilled cheese

[keturn]

Armchair economist thought of the day:

We're Good People if we shift our spending habits to use less resources (Lower Your Carbon Footprint), right? And we're Very Good People if we do this even when it means spending a little more money to do so, by buying the more expensive item that used less fuel to get here, or buying the more expensive

Comments

[glowing_fish]

I think that the idea behind things like clean power and the like is that when people choose to use it, it makes the power company invest more in it. And then, past a certain amount of investing, it starts to be more prevalent, cheaper, etc. Just like with any lifestyle change, if things don't reach a tipping point, it can't really transform society.

And, honestly, I don't think that a lot of the environmental choices that people make are quite strong enough to trigger large changes at this point. A lot of environmental products are just a way for people to display wealth/standing.

[ext_205209]

By that logic isn't the greenest thing to do to shop only at WalMart, where we can most effectively make use of the economic efficiencies offered by the existence of a foreign country with a massive labor force and no "green" compunctions whatsoever?

It's true that that cost is the best way we have of measuring resource usage, but cost alone still sucks as a way of measuring. There is a time delay while we retool, and during that delay, longterm cheap things cost more in the short term.

I think what the green movement is implicitly betting on is the economic failure of China (and countries like it), the loss of China as a viable production platform which would force us to use our own resources. Which, if we've been buying the "good" local stuff and supporting the robustness of our own platform, will hopefully be up to the challenge of meeting production demands.

[freyley]

Or, to not seem sarcastic about it, to shop at walmart and use the savings to fund political action committees that effect the change you seek. This is similar to the idea of not volunteering at nonprofits when actually you could be working harder (in a skilled, and therefore highly paid way) and donating the money, as money as far more valuable to them than your unskilled labor.

There's two different things here

[anonymous]

1. Using more power efficient devices is usually a good idea, as is encouraging it by e.g. banning less efficient devices. First, because it is quite often more cost effective in the long run due to lower operating costs (unless you're really on the bleeding edge of efficiency technology), and second because mass purchases drive costs down over long run by encouraging competition and technological innovation. Thus cost of CFLs is going down over time, and likely the same will happen with LEDs

[stereotype441]

But doesn't that just lower the demand on the fuel and the dirty electricity? Doesn't that lower its price? The Industrial user, without my hippie compunctions, has no incentive to use the expensive power; they're rewarded for using the cheap and dirty stuff.It depends on the slope of the supply curve, otherwise known as the "elasticity" of the supply. If the supply is inelastic, meaning the quantity of goods available is relatively constant regardless of price, then you're right--if a coalition of hippies shift their spending habits to use less fuel, then the price will just move to the point where another group can afford to buy the fuel they didn't buy

[glyf]

This is similar to what some of the other commenters are saying, but:

Specifically in the area of renewable energy resources, the increased cost has a lot to do with initial investment. If you want to generate coal power, you just need to dump some coal into an existing power plant; but if you want to generate wind power, you need to build a whole wind farm first.

So, when you pay a little extra for wind power (as one might do in Massachusetts), what you're really paying that premium for is building more wind farms, which (one hopes) has the long-term effect of decreasing the cost of that power

[freyley]

I generally agree with you. There is, however, a difficulty with wind power specifically: wind power isn't reliable enough to be offered by itself -- it has to be matched by coal or gas (usually gas) power plants that can pick up demand in case the wind isn't blowing. So purchasing wind energy doesn't, yet, reduce demand for hydrocarbon power _plants_, which is a weird side effect. This will change as wind plants crop up in sufficient locations that some percentage of the overall wind power availability will be reliable.

[glyf]

Another way to address this problem is to build large-scale batteries to store the extra power, rather than to try to have continuous generation by widely dispersed coverage.

The simplest design I've heard of for such a thing is a large hydroelectric generator that pumps water uphill while the wind is blowing and runs it downhill through a turbine when it's not.

There are significant engineering and deployment challenges to get such a thing rolled out everywhere, of course. In the meanwhile, hydrocarbon power generation bridges the gaps, but if we were at a point where all it were doing were bridging the gaps we'd still be in a significantly better place than we are today.