[ajuc]

> So, an ask: any historical examples where government policy other than deregulation has increased the efficiency with which a resource is used?

EU banned selling incandescent light bulbs for one example. Which increased demand for LEDs, lowered their prices, and made people switch much faster.

Almost all countries have legislation that mandates fuel usage of passanger cars has to be at most X liters per 100 km. Or at least there's an incentive system with taxes and other bills.

There are minimal standards for thermal insulation of houses.

If you call clean air and clean water a resource then most environmental regulation count.

It's very common actually - it happens every time there's a tragedy of commons and government regulates it.

[donw]

> Almost all countries have legislation that mandates fuel usage of [sic] passanger cars has to be at most X liters per 100 km. Or at least there's an incentive system with taxes and other bills.

I'm not sure that's a great example. At least in the US, adoption of more fuel-efficient cars -- and the ascent of the Japanese motor industry -- started from the 1973 Oil Crisis, whereby oil prices skyrocketed due to a drop in supply.

American automakers had been shipping gas-guzzling land-yachts for years, but pricing changes drove consumers to buy fuel-efficient Japanese cars, where they stayed because Honda had invested in "customer service" and "building reliable cars that worked", whereas Chevrolet's R&D budget was divided between tail fins and finding new buckets of sand into which GM and UAW management could plunge their heads to pretend the rest of the planet didn't exist (to be fair, they're still really good at that).

[ajuc]

TBH American cars are still crazy inefficient from my (European) perspective :)

And oil prices are another way to regulate that. In my country oil price at the station is over 70% taxes.

[donw]

> TBH American cars are still crazy inefficient from my (European) perspective :)

Well, we can't all have Volkswagen do our emissions testing. :)

Why would you say "crazy inefficient"? I don't think that, say, a VW 1.8L is, practically speaking, any more or less efficient than a Ford or Toyota 1.8L. A Ford Focus gets comparable gas mileage to, say, a Golf or a Mazda3.

The Golf has a better interior, but will also fall apart much sooner -- VW in the US has a shockingly bad reputation for reliability and customer service. Which sucks, because I really prefer VW's design language to pretty much any other brand.

You might on average drive smaller cars in the cities, but that's more of a preference issue than