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Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
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Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
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Thanks for sharing, interesting article.
It seems like we basically have a situation where supply is low but the marginal units are very valuable (as they are replacing small gensets). If so, is the underlying issue just that prices are too low? If electricity prices were allowed to rise to the market-clearing rate (ideally using the sort of market mechanisms used in PJM or ERCOT, but alternatively just by using PPAs) supply would increase, and there might be some degree of demand efficiency improvements. The government shouldn't need to build generation capacity - this is firmly within the expertise of the private sector.