competition holds the key to many of our problems. Get people competing to make something, like, ah, an Encyclopedia of Life and you will get an optimized product. Turn it over to a bureaucracy and you will get crap. If solar panels finally cross the cost/technological barrier, as batteries are finally doing, you will see panel envy everywhere. We may see electric bike envy coming along in the next few years and God knows what else.

However, competition between cities may not work. Competition between governments may just turn into who can pass the most regulations and provide the most subsidies (the good and bad nullifying each other).

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

that technology will be the next wave of green. Not just for cultural reasons in the technology crowd, but also because technological industries have so much to gain by going green. For example--transitioning information exchange from paper to online is a great way to save energy (and trees). I wrote a response to this on my blog...