Electricity is such a small part in the cost of running an electric vehicle compared with the fuel costs of an internal combustion engine that i don’t see how doubling the price of electricity would matter

In some areas. On the whole our main uses of energy, housing and cars, are not affected. In fact, efficiency uses have gone into making heavier and faster cars.

Beijing would remain a massively polluted city because oil would be relatively more affordable for the Chinese

That is not ours to decide. I am confident the Chinese government is seeing the national security implications of foreign oil.

Ultimately it is an ethical question whether we want tax emails, personal income etc. or consumption and energy usage.

There’s nothing wrong with taxing fuel instead of labor. I am all in favor of higher fuel taxes in exchange for lower income taxes. But it is counterproductive to even think about electricity. Fuel is the only problem worth thinking about. We need to encourage a switch away from oil. That requires that we not make the alternatives more expensive.

Higher prices are required to finance the investment into energy sources that can be tapped in order to meet the increasing demand for energy that results from poor people becoming wealthy. Otherwise increasing energy efficiency would have the rather paradoxical effect of fossilizing current energy production infrastructure. Beijing would remain a massively polluted city because oil would be relatively more affordable for the Chinese in the context of reduced demand in countries that are at the forefront of innovation in energy production and utilization. Ultimately it is an ethical question whether we want tax emails, personal income etc. or consumption and energy usage.

I am afraid this is a much abused principle. Energy use per unit of GDP has fallen, but not energy use per capita or in absolute terms. This is to be expected. After all we gain nothing by heating our homes warmer than desirable, only the increase in volume will need more energy. My TV uses the same amount of energy whether I can get 3 channels or 30. That we can increase our wealth without increasing energy use does not mean that we can trade wealth for energy by slowing down our increase in wealth to use less energy to the same extent.
By the same logic I could make statistics about agricultural production/GDP and say that in 30 years we may be able to get by with eating microscopic quantities of food.

Don´t we have large enough militaries to protect our societies against maybe 100000 Muslim militants? What might alter that calculation is the prospect of those militants concentrating their efforts on attacking one single nuclear plant.

Renewable energy creates a lot more jobs and leads to a self-sustaining economy. Try to figure the costs of supporting five million jobless into the energy equation.

The demographic transformation just won´t happen as envisaged. We will import as many foreign workers as we need. The whole scenario is based on the premise of perpetuating policies that are detrimental to the creation of a full-employment economy forever. I think we are nearing a point where a majority of the population starts to take a more broadly-based view of the factors that need to be added to the accounting baseline after the micro-economic details have been taken care of.

Factor prices are a concept that has largely gone out of fashion in economics. It is instructive, however, to look at the development of factor prices during the industrial revolution and the population explosion with which it coincided. Remember that the vast increase in productivity was accompanied by a steep rise in income taxes. Present-day economists appear to believe that such developments are logically impossible. They may now no longer be possible where labour productivity is concerned - apart from specific high-tech processes like semiconductor production -, but indications are that energy productivity can indeed be increased as much as labour productivity was during the industrial revolution. When this starts to be realized by larger numbers of people, we will be able to see that the demise of Manchester capitalism in the middle of the 19th century was a major turning point in history that may have an equivalent in the future by a departure from the seemingly inescapable trajectory towards resource wars. However, without more accurate energy pricing this new revolution won´t happen - just as the industrial revolution wouldn´t have taken its course without a major shift in factor prices.

(I singled out air transport as possibly being highly problematic, because it´s the technology area where there really don´t seem to exist any alternatives to current technology on the drawing boards. Scram-jet technology really doesn´t qualify as a real-world alternative. With regard to automobiles, however, it´s not at all inconceivable that the replacement of current engine technology can be achieved quickly enough to avoid a breakdown of personal mobility. It needs to be remembered, though, that cheap-energy policies will hinder rather than enhance that process. Fixing rents in Moscow for half a century didn´t improve standards of living in Russia. Neither will efforts to fix energy prices help us avoid the pitfalls the Soviet Union fell into.)

If we spent all that money, we better use it.

On a larger note, this continent is facing oil & gas shortages, a demographic transformation, a need to raise the living standard in the eastern half, a need to improve education and infrastructure, to spend more on R&D, to increase defense budgets and to secure the “near abroad”. All these problems are not avoidable. Therefore I still claim that we must avoid further large projects we can avoid.

No, air travel is just a small part of our energy needs. And in many cases it is not essential, except for some islands’ economy.

What I really fear is that some day we’ll have to tell people in the suburbs that they won’t be able to afford two or three cars to a family. And that as a consequence the value of the house they put themselves into debt for 20 years for has dropped by half.

The biggest advances can be made by utilizing energy-saving technology.

Nope. They biggest reduction can be made by not doing what required the energy in the first place. If you don’t drive to the shop, the fuel isn’t used.

the prices that they command certainly don´t reflect externalities like the consequences of climate change

I really doubt you can rationally value all externalities. If you flood a valley for a dam, have you done harm by destroying the original enviroment or have you done good by creating a lake birds stop at and people find joy at? What’s the worth of a changed fish population a powerplant causes by heating a river?

Even in things you can give an answer, the answer is far from undisputed. Can you assign a risk to a level of radiation that you would bet your life on? Might there be interactions between several types of pollution that make the mix worse than the addition of each type’s harm?

Personally I wouldn’t mind Europe becoming a bit warmer.

they require politicians to understand that high energy prices have more long-run benefits than short-term disadvantages

A short term disadvantage is not without long term harm. What we spend now on daycare and medical research will have beneficial effects later, which cannot be made up for by later spending. I will again put it bluntly. Electricity is not the problem.