Decision options don't have to be deterministic at all. There can be
conditional options and choice of policies for technological and economic
development strategies. Our options today could be (by rank of expected
returns) "A" conditional of "C*D" or else "B" conditional of "E*F" or else
"C or C'" conditional of "G*H*I...."; It can be a stochastic-based decision
process that taking into considerations of both known & unknown parameters
and their uncertainty distributions while maximizing our expected societal
returns. In fact it's kind of multi-objective and multi-constraints
mathematical programming issues in technical terms. Say for instance, if the
US government allowed large amount of R&D funds for the nuclear industry and
the policy continued for nearly half a century, then it is wise to continue
the level of support if 40 decades later we do see that nuclear energy have
helped solving the bulk of our energy problems and that the unintended
troubles or consequences were not nearly what we all see today. Otherwise,
we need to reduce (or even stop) the support for nuclear power and allowing
options of renewable energies like solar/SSP or others to have a chance,
shouldn't we? If we allowed the creation of nuclear technology by ourselves,
in theory it is not possible to prevent other nations to do the same thing
or preventing others to follow the creative footsteps of our won fellow
human beings on the planet? That is why on the one hand nuclear brought us
good life styles of massive electricity consumptions while at the meantime
we are so busy and so close to going into wars to fight against others from
having the same technology. Doesn't that the neat returns of "improving our
quality of lives" through technology creations simply gets diminished by the
same very technology we have developed?! This is precisely why we need to be
smarter on technology creations and can't just do anything without using our
brains that God gave us for a reason.
SSP concept was studied and killed in the late 1970s by then the powerful
nuclear lobbyists and never allowed a chance and the government is now
continuing to ignore any activities in this regard. Isn't it a wise policy?
That is why I said nuclear has had 40 years of chance to thrive and it did
not meet expectations/conditions of what were believed to be, and it
certainly has not been too cheap for the utilities to even give up their
need of metering the consumers.....
Humans are capable of creating both constructive and destructive forces and
making tremendous progress toward economic developments while at the same
time we also making tremendous amount of troubles for ourselves and that is
why we see WARs and destructions on a daily basis. What we need to do is to
maximizing the constructive side of human activities while trying hard to
minimize the destructive side of our activities, and this will never be
possible if we just allow the "market force" (or raw human nature) to drive
the fate of our future. If we do things well, we should see relative
enduring world peace and quality of lives for majority of our fellow beings.
Otherwise, if we do see too many wars and too many issues and troubles for
everyone to bear, then we haven't done things so well, haven't we?!
Best of luck to us all,
Feng
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Werbos
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2007 5:47 PM
To: Feng.Hsu; 'Global Energy Network'; 'Richard Godwin'; of funding
BobKrone
Subject: RE: hydrazine hydrate and market-based energy choices in general
At 05:15 PM 09/24/2007, Feng Hsu wrote:
>Paul,
>
>"Deciding or making assessments on better energy or any technologies" does
>not have to be "deterministic".
Making **A** choice for what **IS BEST** implies certainty about what is
best.
That's not a stochastic policy.
If we allow the
>commercial force to drive our economy, then there is a price to pay and a
>risk to take. If the risk is too high, in terms of self-destructions and
>man-made planetary ruins, then such risk level is simply unacceptable to
>humanity!
I have never said to use ONLY the raw market. I have actually called
for intervention
to strengthen market competition, and that is a kind of intervention.
And lots more effective R&D.
But as a practical matter, we cannot dictate a single energy source
or carrier for
the entire world. Improved market competition is an important PART of
the solution,
a tool we must make use of, along with all other tools.
I do not see China guiding us to a faster deployment of space solar power,
even though they trust markets less than we do.
Best of luck to us all,
Paul
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