All you need to assume is a really badly implemented reign of regulation and public investment and a damn near perfectly implement carbon tax/ clean energy subsidy. Whereas the Australian carbon tax (probably the best actually existing example) is both lowl, and allows offsets and some of the other kinds of fucking around we see with cap-and-trade . In point of fact there are tons of examples of highly imperfect, but still effective regulation - Japanese appliance and auto standards. The highly neoliberal UK has building efficiency standards that have some truly awful enforcement provisions(private inspectors like auditors in accounting) , and still have resulted in overall climate control consumption that is one of the lowest in the EU.
Incidentally, in response to something Nathan said a few days ago: I think the assertion that C&C regulations are just a form of carbon tax
misses critical factors. For one thing, efficiency regulations impose a result - they don't determine the price you pay to obtain that result. And looking at the fines for non-compliance as a form of carbon tax, overlooks that if the reg is effective at all, most people won't have to pay the fine - unlike a carbon tax or even a cap and trade system where having a high percent of polluters pay the tax or buy permits is critical to working system, at least in early stages. . If you choose to model the fines in particular as a carbon tax, you will end up with anomalous results like absolute elasticity values that are high multiples of unity. That calls into question the value of modeling regulations as a tax. We don't model the costs health and safety rules impose as a tax, even though we don't (and can't) require perfect hygiene and absolute safety. The mere fact that c&c regulations have a cost does not mean that humans respond to them in the same way we would to a tax. (Mind you that cost can sometimes be negative. For example, when you look at liability law even in our corrupt plutocratic state, I'll bet food safety laws for restaurants (as poorly enforced as they are) save the restaurant business overall. If restaurants killed more customers in ways that could be proven (food poisoning and e-coli and so on tend to be tracable much of the time) the lawsuits, liability insurance costs, and people being afraid to eat out would cost them much more than complying with the regulations do. )
It is interesting how the "common sense" of our system affects us all.
Neither Nathan nor I are neoliberal or neoclassical or market
fundamentalist or anything silly like that. Yet, unless we want to put
huge amounts of time into rephrasing the discussion from its "natural"
form we end up talking about it in bloodless abstract terms really
close to the language of neoliberalism. Some of it is a matter of
shared technical terms, but there are huge hidden assumptions in those
terms we have to constantly struggle to avoid accidentally smuggling
in - not always successfully.
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> Shane Mage
> "Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
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