There are communities around the world where, after everyone switching to renewable energy sources, they no longer paid energy bills.
Right, but what was the alternative? Suppose I talked about communities where, once everyone bought into the buyer's cooperative, food was free. (That is, they invested the capital accumulated up-front into a black box that was able to provide food for the community for twenty years.) A few things become apparent:
There must be some sort of limitation. Food could easily be free for me, because I can only eat so many calories a day, but not free for me and my closest million friends in the developing world, unless they also buy in. (For energy use, the relevant user is probably heavy export manufacturing.)
While this sounds great, whether or not it makes numerical sense is another question. How much would you be willing to pay now for free food for the rest of your life? There's some number where it makes sense for you as a customer, even if that requires taking out a loan now, and there's some number that makes sense for them as a supplier, but there's no guarantee that your number will be bigger than their number. (It might cost them a million dollars, and only be worth $100k to you.)
That's not to say these sorts of arrangements never make sense--they often do. But whether or not they make sense has to include some accounting to be serious. (I will note that Exxon is investing in renewable energy--whether as a PR move or a hedge against a foreseeable change in the future, I don't know. But my impression is that once it does make sense to switch, they'll switch. They're in this business for the money, not because they like oil.)
It requires massive corporations to take advantage of economies of scale in order to get a profit from fossil fuels. The new 'energy internet' is far more efficient.
Whoa, hold on a second. Let's take for granted that the energy internet exists as you describe it: an infrastructure investment that costs $1.2T but returns $2T. This requires even more massive corporations than the ones that we currently have, the largest of which typically make investments in the $B rather than the $T. (The largest publicly held corporation is worth about $0.5T.) The issue at stake isn't efficiency, but scale.
That is, a company with $1.2T to invest in nuclear, or coal, or oil, or so on, might also be better than the current US energy supply, and this is just a generic statement of the form "if you invest more money into X, X will be better" and "if you make an organization larger, the amount it can invest in multiplicative improvements increases." (In general, this is one of the reasons why I don't think antitrust laws are all that useful; having people like Rockefeller or Carnegie sitting on metaphorical gold mines and interested in investing in efficiency to get even more profits seems like a good way to ramp up technological growth.)
Ok, so I'm not advocating a world where there is suddenly no business modal and everyone does whatever the hell they want.
I'm advocating (seriously, the book was really comprehensive and very good) the Commons as a governing scheme, wherein members share their resources and have general rules of self governance. This has happened around the world, and there are many isolated communities which have practised this governance model for centuries.
And in regards to your last point, I didn't say that companies would fund anything like this. It would in fact be...
Note: I'm terrible at making up titles, and I think that the one I gave may give the wrong impression. If anyone has a suggestion on what I should change it to, it would be much appreciated.
As I've been reading articles on less wrong, it seems to me that there are hints of an underlying belief which states that not only is capitalism a good economic paradigm, it shall remain so. Now, I don't mean to say anything like 'Capitalism is Evil!' I think that capitalism can, and has, done a lot of good for humanity.
However, I don't think that capitalism will be the best economic paradigm going into the future. I used to view capitalism as an inherent part of the society we currently live in, with no real economic competition.
I recently changed my views as a result of a book someone recommended to me 'The zero marginal cost society' by Jeremy Rifkin. In it, the author states that we are in the midst of a third industrial revolution as a result of a new energy/production and communications matrix i.e. renewable energies, 3-D printing and the internet.
The author claims that these three things will eventually bring their respective sectors marginal costs to zero. This is significant because of a 'contradiction at the heart of capitalism' (I'm not sure how to phrase this, so excuse me if I butcher it): competition is at the heart of capitalism, with companies constantly undercutting each other as a result of new technologies. These technological improvement allow a company to produce goods/services at a more attractive price whilst retaining a reasonable profit margin. As a result, we get better and better at producing things, and it lets us produce goods at ever decreasing costs. But what happens when the costs of producing something hit rock bottom? That is, they can go no lower.
3D printing presents a situation like this for a huge amount of industries, as all you really need to do is get some designs, plug in some feedstock and have a power source ready. The internet allows people to share their designs for almost zero cost, and renewable energies are on the rise, presenting the avenue of virtually free power. All that's left is the feedstock, and the cost of this is due to the difficulty of producing it. Once we have better robotics, you won't need anyone to mine/cultivate anything, and the whole thing becomes basically free.
And when you can get your goods, energy and communications for basically free, doesn't that undermine the whole capitalist system? Of course, the arguments presented in the book are much more comprehensive, and it details an alternative economic paradigm called the Commons. I'm just paraphrasing here.
Since my knowledge of economics is woefully inadequate, I was wondering if I've made some ridiculous blunder which everyone knows about on this site. Is there some fundamental reason why Jeremy Rifkin's is a crackpot and I'm a fool for listening to him? Or is it more subtle than that? I ask because I felt the arguments in the book pretty compelling, and I want some opinions from people who are much better suited to critiquing this sort of thing than I.
Here is a link to the download page for the essay titled 'The comedy of the Commons' which provides some of the arguments which convinced me:
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/1828/
A lecture about the Commons itself:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2009/ostrom_lecture.pdf
And a paper (?) about governing the commons:
http://www.kuhlen.name/MATERIALIEN/eDok/governing_the_commons1.pdf
And here is a link to the author's page, along with some links to articles about the book:
http://www.thezeromarginalcostsociety.com/pages/Milestones.cfm
http://www.thezeromarginalcostsociety.com/pages/Press--Articles.cfm
An article displaying some of the sheer potential of 3D printers, and how it has the potential to change society in a major way:
http://singularityhub.com/2012/08/22/3d-printers-may-someday-construct-homes-in-less-than-a-day/
Edit: Drat! I forgot about the stupid questions thread. Should I delete this and repost it there? I mean, I hope to discuss this topic with others, so it seems suitable for the DISCUSSION board, but it may also be very stupid. Advice would be appreciated.