Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

&gt; Each new person who joins a queue goes to the front, standing immediately behind the person being served. This is, of course, an outrage against reason, intuition and natural justice. It is also highly efficient. If you’re next in line to be served, but someone shows up and shoehorns herself into position in front of you, you walk away. The line is only going to get longer, and you’re always going to be at the back.<p>&gt; Under the Landsburg system, the stalls still serve one seasonal treat a minute<p>Except what would actually happen is everyone who wants a widget stands around “not in the queue” until the person being served is finished, at which point there’s a mad rush to be the next person served. So basically the same thing that happens when there’s no queue :D<p>Classic economist solution!

To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is <i>batteries</i>. So, the problem is to get <i>batteries</i> on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible.<p>This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles, a PHEV will electrify the majority of the miles with a fraction of the battery capacity.<p>Driving an EV is a green status symbol now. I wonder if they could in the future be viewed as &quot;battery hogs&quot;.

Various environmentalists have tried this in the US. Here&#x27;s a reason article about several attempts: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reason.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;18&#x2F;why-dont-environmentalists-just-buy-the-land-they-want-to-protect-because-its-against-the-rules&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reason.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;18&#x2F;why-dont-environmentalists-jus...</a> Kind of frustrating the OP&#x27;s article doesn&#x27;t actually do any research on why it&#x27;s hard to actually do this &quot;clever&quot; idea. There is an actual power structure that is opposed to these sorts of actions!<p>In general in the US it&#x27;s very difficult to do this on state&#x2F;federal land. You usually <i>must</i> make use of your rights or the leases will be revoked. Even when there is a state like Idaho where you can buy grazing rights and supposedly not use them, the state bureaucracy isn&#x27;t interested in it.<p>I guess you could do this with coal rights but the coal markets have been so bad for the last decade it&#x27;s hard to see this as worth doing.

This kind of strategy ignores second order effects.<p>For example, by buying a gas guzzler and not using it much you might lower the emissions from that specific vehicle. But supply and demand rears its ugly head: you&#x27;re contributing to the increase of similar gas guzzlers&#x27; value in the market, which means that other people are more likely to maintain those vehicles in working order and resell them, instead of scrapping them or leaving them unused.

If environmentalists made major impact shutting down mines, the price of coal would go up incentivizing new ones or at least to increase the output of existing ones - demand hasn’t changed. Just the same with buying gas stations and shutting them down, too.

I don’t buy the queue argument. It would devolve in to a bunch of churn inevitably resulting in thrown hands and black eyes.

Perfect example of the kind of simplistic and wishful thinking which plagues modern economics. They assume that their model of the world will solve a problem without bothering to check if it does.

I think I am not very clear on how ‘reverse logic’ is being defined here, but it may not matter. The problem is that real life is much more complex than these simplistic mental models we describe when we talk to each other. People’s needs, desires, and values are not interchangeable. While that one person who drives less could drive a gas car, maybe they prefer the convenience of charging at home. Likewise, the person who drives a lot may require the convenience of filling up gas in five minutes, or maybe they are doing longer trips or carry cargo&#x2F;passengers (amplifying range anxiety).<p>As for the notion of reversing queues - this doesn’t make sense to me, but maybe I am missing something. People who join a queue earlier are signaling a price, in effect. Overriding that is creating an inefficiency in a sense, and is an imposition of someone else’s valuations in place of individual people’s valuations. Apart from that, the methods mentioned here simply feel a bit antagonistic rather than cooperative. I don’t think sustainable societies are built on those types of adversarial tactics.

Clearly anyone who is pushed back in the reverse queue (can i call it a stack?) can just rejoin at the front. You would end up with a spinning “musical chairs queue”.<p>The other examples seem pretty interesting and it has a freakinomics feel about it.<p>The queue solution is simple - using tech: use the buzzers they give you in some restaurants that tell you your meal is ready when you are next in the queue.

I was curious to see if anyone had tried the coal mine bit. This is the closest I could find, a business plan to sell coal attached to carbon credits. Not sure what’s happened since 2016.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;10&#x2F;02&#x2F;business&#x2F;energy-environment&#x2F;a-curious-plan-to-fight-climate-change-buy-mines-sell-coal.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;10&#x2F;02&#x2F;business&#x2F;energy-environme...</a>

Why buy coal mines if you could just by oil tankers and let them idle? This would drive up oil prices in many places, reduce demand demand for oil and make renewables and energy efficient technologies more competitive.

Sorry, but none of this works - although it’s a fun thought experiment. It’s very hard to predict human behaviour and it’s impossible to know how things will unfold over time.<p>Closing coal mines without having an alternative power source would only create shortages and price hikes.<p>Only 2-3% of new car sales are EVs. You not getting an EV to leave it to someone else is not going to get that number up.<p>The line thing would exasperate people and everyone would leave. Actually, seeing long lines and impatient customers is probably the best way to accelerate service by stressing out the staff.

&gt; Under the Landsburg system, the stalls still serve one seasonal treat a minute, but the queues are short. Alas, the Landsburg rule can only be imposed in controlled environments such as a theme park, perhaps.<p>Poor example. This would annoy the hell out of customers. Theme parks also almost always have excess demands for rides. This system would only work at a failing theme park that couldn&#x27;t fill up the ride to capacity.<p>I could imagine this working with decentralized robots performing similar tasks independently, but usually a system that uses robots would be centralized.

Buying up coal deposits to prevent mining is new to me, but the idea is quite familiar in the realm of buying up rainforest to prevent deforestation.

The “Cash for Clunkers” program was actually instituted over a decade ago in the US.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Car_Allowance_Rebate_System" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Car_Allowance_Rebate_System</a>

You should by a coal mine and close it. Is equivalent to saying „you should buy the freedom of every slave“. Somethings have to be done at the National level and collectively.

I don&#x27;t think the idea of reverse logic is even clear. Exactly what aspect should you choose to reverse? A better name would be unintuitive logic, but we already know some things are unintuitive.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ocw.mit.edu&#x2F;courses&#x2F;sloan-school-of-management&#x2F;15-988-system-dynamics-self-study-fall-1998-spring-1999&#x2F;readings&#x2F;behavior.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ocw.mit.edu&#x2F;courses&#x2F;sloan-school-of-management&#x2F;15-98...</a><p>Im just learning about Jay Forrester, but he wrote the foundational paper on this kind of thinking. I also highly recommend Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows, which contains a lot of other wisdom like this.

British Columbia has conservation groups doing precisely this: acquiring forestry rights with the intention of never harvesting[0].<p>Word has it that the Provincial Government will be supporting this effort.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbc.ca&#x2F;news&#x2F;canada&#x2F;british-columbia&#x2F;conservation-private-land-acquisition-bc-1.6288600" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbc.ca&#x2F;news&#x2F;canada&#x2F;british-columbia&#x2F;conservation...</a>

Logic: You can produce thoughtful work, with detailed examination of how incentives played out in real life, and how real people responded to those incentives. Your work will attract both scientists and laypersons, and be read by both. However, you have to do a lot of data analysis, statistics, and present them in a way that&#x27;s attractive to both sets of people.<p>Reverse logic: Write blog posts with outrageous suggestions with little real-world applicability, that are equivalent to argument junk food. The few people who think deeply about statistics and behavioral economics will ignore it, but the vast majority of people will eagerly discuss it, link to your page, and sell your work.<p>I think the reverse logic works!

If you want to cause tremendous inflationary pain to the working class and rolling blackouts through an energy transition this is how you do it.<p>We are not at the stage where we can bootstrap green yet. You still require fossil fuels to build a green economy. Sure, coal is bad as an energy source, but that EV you want has a ton of steel inside and that requires metallurgical coal. The copper required for a green economy needs to be mined, and the machines used in a mine require a portable, dense fuel source like oil.<p>To make matters worse, energy prices feed into other areas of the economy. Ammonia costs have skyrocketed due to the energy issues and that&#x27;s causing the price of wheat and corn to skyrocket.<p>The proper policy is carbon credits and a measured transition unless you&#x27;re ready to punish the working class and developing nations.

He is right that LIFO (last in first out) queue is more efficient when there&#x27;s more demand than queue throughout. But the fairness isn&#x27;t just a problem with the sense of justice. As indicated, with a fixed timeout, LIFO will cause more spurious timeouts when FIFO wouldn&#x27;t. The best of all worlds, if the speed of light or transition between different queues isn&#x27;t an issue, is to have a centralized queue management forming a super queue. Some stores do this already, creating a single queue that dispatches shoppers to a checkout counter. Doing this cuts down the average wait time, and makes people &quot;give up&quot; more willingly under heavy load, since the queue would look much longer.

<i>An environmentalist organisation could do this by buying them and shuttering them.</i><p>The problem with this is that eventually the government notices what you&#x27;re doing and just takes it away from you. This happens regularly with attempts to preserve natural lands and resources.

A different way to get to the same result as a minimum fuel requirement would be to raise base prices and offer steep bulk discounts. This would be easier to enforce than a minimum fuel requirement. Unfortunately it might raise &quot;price gouging&quot; complaints.

Half of these things feel like you can have way better solutions:<p>- Spot price the gallon and set the minimum order increment to 5 gallons. Pre-purchase and then arrive to collect or pay the spot price at the time of arrival<p>- Switch the stall queue to a ticket system. You buy your thing and plug in a contact number (or wait). You are either notified by phone (or by voice when you’re there). Lots of food courts already do this.<p>- There’s no reason to buy coal mines. You can just political currency instead of normal currency. If your time is worthless or you have cultivated political currency for a while, the former is incredibly cheap

&gt; Here’s a thought: environmentalists should fight climate change by buying coal mines.<p>Matt Levine wrote about this recently (unfortunately I could not find the reference but it was in the last month). One of the big bank tried to launch a fund for this but it was met with a hostile reception.

Here&#x27;s another one: Virtuous people should make and sell weapons, thereby reducing the funding to companies that lobby for invasions.

The older I get, the more I enjoy reading the thoughts of economists.

I sometimes wish we would just burn it all and call it a day. It would be a disaster but it&#x27;s already one anyways.<p>Just burn it all so some rich people get richer and then are out of a job because there is nothing left

The logic used in these &quot;ideas&quot; is so comically bad that you know an economist must have thought of them.

Coal, and most resources like that that are part of the commons, if not developed you rightly would lose it.<p>For the queuing as they explain it, you would just leave the queue and rejoin it, and get to the front? It works well for negatives like firing people.<p>Reverse logic might be cooler if the article came with <i>one</i> example of where it worked IRL. But I guess if it works it&#x27;s logic?

I bought a new car this year when I graduated and got a new job. The main reason I didn&#x27;t buy an EV is because of the cost, the dependability (I&#x27;m not gonna be a guinea pig wasting time getting repairs that not many people know how to resolve yet), and because I live in the Midwest where salted roads in winter just eat the hell out of everything. So I&#x27;m gonna need a new car in 5-10 years anyway.<p>Obviously EV is the future. But with this &quot;Vehicles as a Service&quot; model where a lot of stuff is not meant to be touched by you, it seems like cars are just getting absurdly more expensive for no reason at all. EV is a marketing term so that somehow causes the product to be worth an extra $5k right off the bat.<p>By driving less than 10-20 miles a week with a gas vehicle, I feel like I&#x27;m actually doing more to save the planet than the typical EV driver doing 100+ miles thinking their excessive driving is 100% eco-friendly. Consumption is never eco-friendly.