Hope gets going.

In You Want Hope..., I discuss the hope that the market for green technologies will finally get off the ground and that at some point we'll actually have renewable energy that is competitive in price with fossil fuels.

The next part of the story is how things really get going.

But first, can I suggest you just ignore it when some bozo claims energy efficiency and reduction in fossil fuel use will hurt the economy, because the opposite is true.

Now, consider this: if we work to generate cleaner power and learn to be increasingly efficient, we will develop skills -- a national creation of knowledge -- that will provide a new competitive advantage (a sustainable one!). Just one example benefit: if our energy costs less and we use it more efficiently, we will attract investment because energy intensive industries like steel and cement production will find it profitable to locate facilities here near the cheaper power and more knowledgeable energy efficiency experts.

Imagine that! Foreign capital invested in the U.S manufacturing industry! It'd be like a do-over for what we should have done in the 70s and '80s.

It's called First Mover strategy. If a company (or nation) is the the first to exploit a market innovation, it will get to the lower costs from economies of scale while everyone else still faces the higher costs. That means we get time to keep refining the technology while others are just trying to adopt it. It's like getting a power boost that jumps us ahead of other nations and renders petro-dictatorships increasingly neutered.

The nation that gets closest to a sustainable economy first will have an economy in overdrive, maybe even warp-drive.