@Dodgy Geezer - Re: @Vladimire Plouzhnikov - Sigh...
Thank you for the offer of an Economics Lesson, but since I studied the subject at A Level, I think I'll decline and just point out the flaws in your post:
1) "The market automatically makes us use ALL resources at the appropriate level of efficiency depending on their rarity/value."
Balderdash. In a completely free market, products, energy and so on will be sold at whatever price the customers will bear. This is why, for instance, we currently have the nonsense of the retail energy companies saying "it's not our fault that prices are going up, it's because of the wholesale cost" whilst forgetting to mention that they are buying the power from generators which they *also* own!
Their retail arms are only making small profits because their wholesale arms are coining it in as they have a tacit cartel agreement with their fellow generators that nobody will rock the boat by cutting the wholesale price and they know that the consumers are stuck with buying it at whatever price they're told it is.
2) "If you want to make people save energy and use it more efficiently, you are going to have to raise its price considerably"
Again, balderdash. Why do we now buy fridges and freezers etc which are more energy efficient than the ones that were available in the past? Because they are cheaper to run! If you have the choice between paying X to run a fridge every year or 50% of X, why would you buy a less efficient fridge when you need to replace it?
3) "There is NO justification for forcing energy prices high".
I agree entirely and I wouldn't argue for that as it's short sighted and ignores the fact that energy (like petrol etc) have a relatively inelastic demand curve, whereby pushing the price up causes only a small reduction in the quantity used.
So, inconclusion, more efficient use will either bring down the amount of consumption or (at the least) slow down the rate of increase of consumption. Either way it's win-win.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
