Ditto, really appreciate your taking the time to so thoughtfully engage. :) A good day on the Forum! I’ll try to wrap up here as well.
(a) Thanks for this reference—I wasn’t aware of it! This definitely seems like useful evidence in the right direction and I agree with the XKCD’s comic sentiment. That said, it seems like there are still many possible contingencies where price might be a partial rather than full cause. This seems like a ripe area for further research.
(b) I agree, my list is incomplete, and these are good considerations. By the same token, I am no expert in clean power, so hadn’t thought about some of these challenges like intermittency. Along the same lines of this issue, focusing only on successful technologies also introduces a bias—for example, I imagine a similar graph as above which included nuclear would tell a different story.
I also agree there’s evidence to be gleaned from studying other sustainability technologies; we certainly shouldn’t ignore these other transitions. But I would like to see them studied more rigorously and systematically, including positive and negative instances; analogies and disanalogies; and contemporary techniques in causal inference.
I also think that the energy tech analogy might be useful, in particular the case of solar panels, which, unlike nuclear and other energy sources, are also consumer products that went from “rich persons vanity project” to “you’d be dumb not to buy one”.
Decades ago, solar cells were highly expensive, and mainly used for niche applications. There was environmentalists pressure towards clean energy, but the high cost meant only a few wealthy enthusiasts would undergo the switch, and the industry was small and non-influential.
The environmentalist movement was influential in changing this in several ways, first by getting funding for R&D into developing cheaper, more efficient solar panels, second by subsidizing solar energy so it was more cost competitive for consumers, third by encouraging governments to directly build solar farms, and fourth by increasing public support for clean energy so people felt good about buying solar.
The result of this was a feedback loop. Solar was cheaper to buy, and more fashionable, so more people bought it. And the more people bought it, the cheaper solar got, thanks to mass production techniques, so the more people bought it. And then the industry became large and influential. Eventually, solar became cost-competitive without subsidies in many places, so consumers felt it was a good investment, and then everyone in the neighborhood had it, so it became a normal thing that everyone did. (I’m thinking here of parts of australia where pretty much everyone has solar).
I wonder if you polled people about switching to solar in 1990, whether they might seem as reluctant as people are about substitute meat today.
The big difference between PTC meat-substitutes and solar might be in the effect of mass production: could a “feedback loop” of cheaper meat-substitutes causing more consumption causing cheaper meat-substitutes occur? I think there could also be a social feedback loop, where the more people go veggie, the more normalised it becomes, leading more people to go veggie, etc.
In my (non-expert) opinion, PTC in addition to public pressure and opinion changing movements could be much more effective than either of the two on their own. It seems obviously easier to persuade people to make easier changes, but you actually have to persuade them.
Ditto, really appreciate your taking the time to so thoughtfully engage. :) A good day on the Forum! I’ll try to wrap up here as well.
(a) Thanks for this reference—I wasn’t aware of it! This definitely seems like useful evidence in the right direction and I agree with the XKCD’s comic sentiment. That said, it seems like there are still many possible contingencies where price might be a partial rather than full cause. This seems like a ripe area for further research.
(b) I agree, my list is incomplete, and these are good considerations. By the same token, I am no expert in clean power, so hadn’t thought about some of these challenges like intermittency. Along the same lines of this issue, focusing only on successful technologies also introduces a bias—for example, I imagine a similar graph as above which included nuclear would tell a different story.
I also agree there’s evidence to be gleaned from studying other sustainability technologies; we certainly shouldn’t ignore these other transitions. But I would like to see them studied more rigorously and systematically, including positive and negative instances; analogies and disanalogies; and contemporary techniques in causal inference.
I also think that the energy tech analogy might be useful, in particular the case of solar panels, which, unlike nuclear and other energy sources, are also consumer products that went from “rich persons vanity project” to “you’d be dumb not to buy one”.
Decades ago, solar cells were highly expensive, and mainly used for niche applications. There was environmentalists pressure towards clean energy, but the high cost meant only a few wealthy enthusiasts would undergo the switch, and the industry was small and non-influential.
The environmentalist movement was influential in changing this in several ways, first by getting funding for R&D into developing cheaper, more efficient solar panels, second by subsidizing solar energy so it was more cost competitive for consumers, third by encouraging governments to directly build solar farms, and fourth by increasing public support for clean energy so people felt good about buying solar.
The result of this was a feedback loop. Solar was cheaper to buy, and more fashionable, so more people bought it. And the more people bought it, the cheaper solar got, thanks to mass production techniques, so the more people bought it. And then the industry became large and influential. Eventually, solar became cost-competitive without subsidies in many places, so consumers felt it was a good investment, and then everyone in the neighborhood had it, so it became a normal thing that everyone did. (I’m thinking here of parts of australia where pretty much everyone has solar).
I wonder if you polled people about switching to solar in 1990, whether they might seem as reluctant as people are about substitute meat today.
The big difference between PTC meat-substitutes and solar might be in the effect of mass production: could a “feedback loop” of cheaper meat-substitutes causing more consumption causing cheaper meat-substitutes occur? I think there could also be a social feedback loop, where the more people go veggie, the more normalised it becomes, leading more people to go veggie, etc.
In my (non-expert) opinion, PTC in addition to public pressure and opinion changing movements could be much more effective than either of the two on their own. It seems obviously easier to persuade people to make easier changes, but you actually have to persuade them.