Piggyback Policies

First, the motivation of the blog: To outline/brain storm/develop ideas which might seem to be obvious solutions to some problems but they are interesting as well. Or, this could be a trivial solution when the complex real-world problem is converted to a very general or a very specific one, but when you translate the solution to the more realistic setting, the solution seems interesting and non-trivial.

So, in my first illustration, I address the policy making problem for world-energy issue. I would first outline the real world problem, then the approximate problem followed by the obvious looking solution. and looking at solution in real-world problem to see if it is indeed helpful.

Energy Problem: Most of us agree that climate change is real. Assuming it is indeed real, the biggest way to prevent our earth from heating up further is to reduce our carbon footprint - fossil fuel burning for energy being one of biggest sources of carbon compounds in air. Hence, shifting from fossil fuels as an energy source to renewables like solar, wind etc is of  generally agreed upon as the best way to go forward. There are many factors which limit our ability to exploit renewable sources of energy like technology and cost, but the fossil fuel companies are also opposition for newer energy sources.

Approximation: Let us consider the simplification that the opposition by fossil-fuel companies is the only limiting factor for development and implementation of alternative clean energy technologies.

Obvious Solution:    Remove the opposition. Somehow make the fossil fuel companies want clean energy badly. This could be done by giving them big monetary benefits for specifically investing in clean energy. Already, there are policies that give benefits to companies that invest in clean energy development. But you need to give a large short term benefit , specifically to oil companies. 'Large benefit' should be such that amount saved by oil companies is proportional to amount invested in  clean energy research.  Specifically to oil companies, because only then the oil companies will see their competitive advantage in investing in clean energy and stop opposing!

Interpret solution in real problem: The next step is to see if it is indeed helpful/interesting to implement the above solution in the real-world problem. There are two aspects to this analysis :

1. If Solution is still affective in removing the opposition by oil companies in real world : I feel this would be a 'YES'. Further comments required on how to address this question better.

2. Assuming the solution removes the opposition by oil companies, what about the other problems - like technology and cost? I think that if big oil companies invest heavily in clean energy research, and given their expertise in field of energy in general, this would encourage faster research! Again, further comments required.

So, an obvious solution to an approximation of the real world problem would help considerably in the actual problem. Further analysis also requires formulating the complex real world problem better.


Feedback: I am really looking for good feedback. I am thinking of formatting it based on wikipedia. So, you can just suggest some changes in the ideas and we can brain-storm together to make this a good piece worth reading. 

Specifically, I am trying to sell my overall approach as principled way to discuss 'obvious and interesting' ideas. Improvement in the overall approach could help in doing better in further posts on different topics.

I am not very familiar with policy making, and so I have not done enough literature survey into policy making methods ;  it would be great if you can suggest if/where this method of 'converting' opposers into supporters is already used.

Comments on the topic in this post would be great to make the idea concrete and justified.