Government Incentives Can Be A Good Thing

This post is a little more political than I usually like to get (at least on this blog) but I just finished reading a great article on energy efficiency and why some direct government involvement is necessary to make that happen, and I thought the article deserved a shout out. You can read the full article and it's in-depth awesomeness here (Energy Efficiency), but the main points are that:

• Resource intelligence (aka energy efficiency) is profitable. Study after study (after study) shows that homes and businesses have available a range of investments, technologies, and practices that cut energy use and pay handsome returns. (For example, this three-year study of efficiency in buildings.)

• Resource intelligence isn’t happening on its own. Despite the aforementioned studies, people aren’t taking advantage of the opportunities at anything close to the available scale. The low-hanging fruit stubbornly remains unplucked. (Maybe because the people looking at that fruit aren't doing enough synergizing and social media research)
  

• Resource intelligence is central to the climate/energy challenge. The International Energy Agency describes a scenario for achieving 450 ppm (the widely shared though likely inadequate target for atmospheric concentrations of CO2). Of the emission reductions they project, energy efficiency is responsible for 54%.

• There’s need for public-private partnerships to restructure markets or create new ones. Market economics leads to a somewhat passive view of public life, wherein our collective welfare is entrusted to markets, to millions of allegedly rational individuals. But here we have a problem—the deterioration of the atmosphere—that presents us with great urgency, and a solution—resource intelligence—that requires our active intervention.

Basically, we have a situation where a 100% rational person would be investing in energy efficiency, but they aren't for any number of reasons, some good and some completely ridiculous. In order to get these people to make the decisions which are good for their health, their wallets and the environment as a whole, we need to educate them and/or give them some more incentives. Sounds good to you? Me too.