Liberal Talk Radio

Boy, there sure are some complicated-ass ways to increase energy efficiency out there. Apparently you can create a public corporation tasked with finding efficiency, you can have the public utilities buy people more efficient air conditioners. You can do all this cool stuff… but it’s all way complicated and probably doesn’t work because no one wants to pay for it anyway:

At a recent conference on energy efficiency and investment strategy, Pedro Haas, an energy expert at McKinsey & Company, said his consulting firm recently asked people worldwide what payback time they would find acceptable before investing money to save energy.

One fourth of them said they would never spend any money to improve energy efficiency; 50 percent said they wanted to earn back the investment in two years or less.

“That means about 75 percent of the public will require economics that are just not there,” Mr. Haas said.

This is of course, the appeal of a carbon tax. As long as the energy’s cheap to make, efficiency is going be hard to accomplish. This is why — as much as it pains me to say it — Dick Cheney was basically right when he said conservation is a personal virtue. We need to see the full costs of our choices. Cheney used this as a reason we need to drill for more oil, but I’d argue it’s the reason we need to tax the hell out of carbon-based energy.

Phase it in over a few years. Give people and business plenty of advance notice so they can prepare. Way less complicated.