a "level playing field" would be a basic requirement for competition, no?

Not spewing pollution or carbon dioxide would appear to be a sensible requirement to level the playing field, no?

::

But I've obviously been mistaken to think that efficient markets provide "true" prices that allow investors and consumers to make the right decisions as to the use or the provision of a good (energy in that case).

Silly me.

The goal is to provide low monetary prices, at the exclusion of everything else.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Ah, but this goes back to that NATO blokey saying that he was on the frontline to preserve "our" way of life, ie western profligate conservatism.

To suggest that we reverse the cultural habits of centuries and constrain our appetites makes you, as far as their viewpoint stretches, a traitor to the western way of life, they think you want us to lose.  Therefore you aree a certificable and, thus, ignorable dirty f...ing hippy. And you probably hate America too.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Yes, damn them all!!

You missed off damning those who think these companies should be directly paying the social costs too, as well as inhibiting their freedom to make the big bucks with all these regulations and hippy-esque protests.

We find that Kurth, the German Energy Minister, is actually bitching about the EC effort to separate generation from transmission, as is using this argument to propose a "third way."  This third way involves allowing the continued ownership of both sides of the coin, but uses greater "transparency" to cover for actual regulation.  Silly us to think that E.on or RWE would change their stripes.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

on the subject of energy, because it seems to me the terms of debate are not served either by our ruling elite nor, in this case, by absolute subservience to the will of superstitious people who think nuclear power will turn their children chartreuse. I know the will of the people here is turning against dirty and underpriced coal, and that's good, but most of the time it's nukes getting the same treatment, especially in Germany, and so vox populi is not always vox dei...

Just build some more safe, efficient nuclear power plants, adequately price pollution into the use of carbon fuels like coal and petrol to encourage conservation, provide efficient, clear and convenient transportation alternatives to the private automobile, adequately price externalities of private automobile ownership into the cost of owning and operating one and be done with it.

Oh and I want a tax credit for riding my bike to work every day like folks get for driving their car...

Can it be this hard?

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill