Early adopters pay a premium for their embrace of innovation. If you bought one of the first electric cars in the United States, you had limited range, long charging times, and very little infrastructure to support you on anything but the shortest journeys. If you’d held out just a little bit longer, you could have spent a lot less money and gotten a lot more vehicle.
Foot-draggers, in other words, can reap a lot of benefits, whether as a result of ignorance (not knowing about a new product), fear (of making a mistake), or strategic patience. But too many foot-draggers could doom innovation.
Public policy is often designed to reward early adopters and light a fire underneath the foot-draggers. During the Biden years, EV buyers could receive a tax rebate, and the administration invested money into the expansion of charging stations. As a result, consumers rejiggered their cost-benefit analyses, and for a short period demand exceeded supply. As more companies went into the EV business, the United States, at least briefly, began to move away from the combustion engine.
The Paris Agreement was supposed to create an overall environment to shape such Green public policies. Unfortunately, the Paris targets were voluntary, which meant …read more
Source:: Institute for Policy Studies
