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Written by Bob Guyer
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Funding and management of energy, water, will be excluded from the second floor economy and will be funded through the conversion of NASA and military funding described previously. The administration of this agency through the action of the federal legislature would have the ability to tax local labor and second floor economic activity if necessary secondary to the pursuit of developing clean environmentally sustainable energy and adequate supplies of water.
There are many interesting proposals that have been made by visionary environmental activists. Lester Brown in his book, Plan B 2.0, has said that wide spread wind power, national electrical grid improvements, rapid adoption of hybrid gas/electrical transportation with supplementary plug in battery capacity could reduce gasoline use by 70% and the electricity cost in gas equivalents of 50 cents per gallon. Other experts think that a rapid conversion to hydrogen as our principal energy carrier with a clean renewable charging source (wind, solar, or both) is the best approach.
The decision about which technologies and in what mix would be optimal would be the decision of the converted NASA group and would be a purely technical decision as energy was no longer hooked to a second floor economic model. The exciting aspect of this approach is that rapid and intelligent progress could be made without regard to how much money can be made.
As clean energy assets were turned on high polluting energy assets would be turned off. The investors would be paid for their stock at the rate they paid for the stock initially, plus inflation over the period the investment was held by the investor. The cost of the buy back of dirty energy producing assets would be funded by the availability of clean very low cost energy and the original investors could be paid an annuity for 20 years that would recoup their initial cost of investment. The annuity would stop being paid back at the time of the investors’ death.
Since our current economic system doesn’t acknowledge externalities it is not capable of managing a transition of civilizations energy infrastructure. In fact management of our energy infrastructure has been in the hands of those who control private energy capital and the result has been acceleration in the wrong direction.
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Economic System