A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

112 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon trading‘Lock-in’ is one reason why addressing theclimate crisis requires not just clever inventionsthat use carbon more efficiently oreven get the carbon out of energy entirely,but also political movements that get energycompanies out of fossil fuel de posits,Northern military establishments out ofoil-rich regions, oil and car manufacturers’lobbyists out of positions of politicalpower in Washington, and Northern agribusinessout of Southern lands needed forbasic local requirements.broader change because they constrain ‘available’ choices. ‘Very seldomdoes optimising each component in isolation ... optimise the systemas a whole’. 172 An inertia takes hold that is difficult to break.Fossil fuel-based energy systems are no different. They weren’t chosenbecause they were a rational, low-cost, efficient means of meetingpre-existing ends, but for other reasons (see box, above: Locking inFossil Fuels in the US). ‘Timing, strategy and historic circumstance,as much as optimality, determined the winner’ 173 of the competitionto determine what energy system would be used.Lock-in is as much social as technological. In the UK, for instance,transport has become locked into what energy consultant RogerLevett describes as a complex ‘vicious circle’ involving habits andcommunity structure as much as fuels and engines (see Figure 3). 177Without this locked-in structure, Levett estimates that fuel use in theUK could be cut by 87 per cent and carbon-based fuels eliminatedaltogether using existing technologies. Similar assessments have comefrom the US and elsewhere. 178In sum, ‘locked-in’ technologies and social structures – including fossildependentenergy and transport systems – are likely to be difficult tochange in the short term even when they were not originally adoptedfor efficiency reasons and are economic dead ends in the long term.Conversely, alternative technologies may be expensive or difficult todevelop in the short term even when they promise to be cheaper in thelong term; many success stories have failed early efficiency tests. 179Even when they can provide starting points toward restructuring societyaway from fossil fuel dependence, they are penalised by beingdeprived of economies of scale, synergies and political and culturalentrenchment. The economic calculations characteristic of emissionstrading work best within a given social and technological regime, anddon’t provide good incentives for changing that regime.‘Entrepreneurial discoveryconsists not in achievingeffi ciency in dealingwith a given situationbut in alertness to thepossibility that the truesituation (with respect towhich effi ciency would beworth pursuing) is in factdiff erent from the situationthat had been assumed tobe given.’ 180Israel M. Kirzner, 1985