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Principles
Seven years ago I formulated four principles that should govern energy use. I did so because there were no principles that I could find governing energy use. Energy use was, and still is, governed by a collection of wishes, desires, practices and regulations without any underlying principles.
I set out my principles in “the Energy Age” and hoped that when it came to energy use by humanity, the prime cause of rapid climate change, humanity would start working from principles as to what it should and should not do when it came to using energy, instead of doing what it always did, which was to govern the use of energy by the cheapness or expense of it. Money has many good uses, as a medium of exchanging one person’s labour, talent and expertise in one field for that of another’s. But it is a poor protector of the environment.
It seems to me that policy makers are incapable of truly working from principles. Give them a set of principles and they will adapt and compromise them, because that is their way of working. But adaptation and compromise of principles leads to their corruption, and a corrupted principle is no principle at all and not merely worthless but usually dangerous.
It is very easy for policymakers and politicians to use as a starting point a set of principles. Unfortunately principles should not be, for these, a starting point, but the destination.
Filed under: climate change Tagged: Energy Age, energy use, prime cause, rapid climate change, use energy, using energy 
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