Whether you look at the necessity in terms of economics or socio-economics or a lack of energy density, or just plain survival, the need simply isn’t pressing enough yet (i.e. the price of oil not high enough, the supply not limited enough, the demand not high enough relative to supply, people aren’t cold enough, etc.) to force the solutions.
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I agree that necessity is the mother of creativity. I also believe that a total change in infrastructure takes decades. Actually a .gov funded think tank already did a study on risk mitigation for PO. They concluded that it would take 2 decades to avoid serious economic fallout. So here we are at the zero hour and what happened to the market solutions? Its pretty obvious what the market solution will be, less employment. Typical industry-gov coverup hiding data. Lets just say it’s really far off and maybe nobody will notice.
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“Technology looking for a problem” is a waste. Solutions emerge because there is a need, not the other way around. Yes, you have to characterize the problem scientifically, but people don’t feel the need scientifically. They feel it economically. Economics drives them to define and solve the problem with science.
While economics is a dismal science, I find it useful for qualitative descriptions, not quantitative. One conclusion I can draw from studying econ is this – when there is a problem such that people can profit from solving it, many people will try like hell to solve it. If nobody can profit from solving it, then much fewer people will try to solve it, or worse – the government tries to solve it and spends lots of money on non-issues.
Right now, the need isn’t compelling enough.
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Says who, the price point? Or mountains of scientific data indicating otherwise.
Ironically it is science telling us, collectively, that economics can’t fix many things. So it may be necessary to create new economics. After all, it is a man made construct.
The one thing we can be sure of. There will be no recovery. If we did start to increase consumption oil would spike and knock us down.
If we fall deeper into “depression” less of a need for new energy. In a very real way the downturn is PO mitigation because we saw what happened in spring of 08. Fuel protests in europe, food riots in the 3rd world. Airlines and trucking starts to go bust at about $110 and globalization shuts down because of energy prices acting as big tariffs.
I guess some market solutions may not be want we want.
For there to be a recovery, in the sense that we are used ie more jobs more consumption, we will need sufficient alternatives in place to avoid price spikes. So follow that and see what gets deployed. Conversely we are in an economic period were less and less will get invested in such things. So I doubt we will try and stand up again for a while anyway.
