Text-Only Version
Mark Anderson, Senior Instructor, School of Economics: "The energy crisis is something we've been through before in the 1970s, and we know that people will respond to it, but the response is difficult--it means changing patterns of behavior at the personal level. We saw that happen in the 70s--the economy became much more energy-efficient. It will become much more energy-efficient this time as well, but it is very challenging for people to deal with that process, so there's this short-term pain which politicians respond to. For example, we asked for a gas tax holiday to lower the cost of gasoline, but the long-term solution here is what the Europeans have done, which is to make energy more expensive gradually over time so that households and firms adjust to the higher cost of fuel, and they adjust by adopting new technologies or adopting existing technologies more aggressively, so that the structure of the economy changes over time. Ironically, what we need to be doing right now is raising energy prices through higher energy taxes, and that's a political non-starter for any of the candidates."
