Thanks to Alex my friend and coauthor on the RootTax for pointing out that my last post implies one should never use fossil fuel as it's a deal with the devil.
Of course, saintly adherence to this principal is clearly impossible.
However, Faustian stories have relished a special type of deal, one in which man outwits the the devil.
In this analogy I believe one can count victory over the devil whenever one uses energy from hell to build systems that more than pay back that amount of energy using energy from heaven. If a society were to keep beating the devil in this way they'd be on their way toward virtually limitless energy production.
Example: For every kWH I consume I must invest into a fund to build utility solar to produce at least 1kWH over the next 15 years. That would mean that in 15 years of doing this there would be enough solar power to litterally provide for every kWH I wanted, without any fossil fuel. Any society that keeps doing that becomes independently-energy-rich, in one generation. Correct me if I'm missing something but I believe that this is what we'd call pro-growth.
The above is to illustrate a point, NOT a suggestion of policy.
In reality such programs are plagued by bureaucracy, fraud and inefficiency; I'm not a fan.
I'm not in favor of any program that would attempt to force such a contrived system, it would doubtlessly go wrong somehow. However, I'm suggesting that if Pigovian taxes were put in place to price resource use these these investments would make sense. Thus, we would expect to see these investments happen naturally, and be executed efficiently.
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