Great minds think alike

http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2007/03/great_minds_thi.html

Russell Roberts

Here is  HYPERLINK "http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8O0O1I00&show_article=1" Al Gore testifying before Congress on the virtues of small-scale energy production:

Gore advised lawmakers to cut carbon dioxide and other warming gases 90 percent by 2050 to avoid a crisis. Doing that, he said, will require a ban on any new coal-burning power plants—a major source of industrial carbon dioxide—that lack state-of-the-art controls to capture the gases. 

He said he foresees a revolution in small-scale electricity producers for replacing coal, likening the development to what the Internet has done for the exchange of information.

 HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward" Here is Mao on the virtues of small-scale steel production:

In the August 1958 Politburo meetings, it was decided that steel production would be set to double within the year, most of the increase coming through backyard steel furnaces. Mao was shown an example of a backyard furnace in  HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hefei" \o "Hefei" Hefei,  HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anhui" \o "Anhui" Anhui in September 1958 by provincial first secretary Zeng Xisheng. The unit was claimed to be manufacturing high quality steel (though in fact the finished steel had probably been manufactured elsewhere). Mao encouraged the establishment of small backyard steel furnaces in every commune and in each urban neighbourhood.

If Al Gore thinks energy can be produced the way information is produced, he either doesn't understand energy or he doesn't understand information. Here is the  HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward" Wikipedia summary of the decentralized experiment of Mao:

Huge efforts on the part of peasants and other workers were made to produce steel out of scrap metal. To fuel the furnaces the local environment was denuded of trees and wood taken from the doors and furniture of peasants' houses. Pots, pans, and other metal artifacts were requisitioned to supply the "scrap" for the furnaces so that the wildly optimistic production targets could be met. Many of the male agricultural workers were diverted from the harvest to help the iron production as were the workers at many factories, schools and even hospitals. As could have been predicted by anyone with any experience of steel production or basic knowledge of  HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy" \o "Metallurgy" metallurgy, the output consisted of low quality lumps of  HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_iron" \o "Pig iron" pig iron which was of negligible economic worth.

Castro had similar failed experiments that impoverished his people.

Giving up the economies of scale we currently use for energy production is going to be very expensive.