Don Pittis has reported on business for Radio Hong Kong, the BBC and the CBC.

I am not generally a Ford Lincoln kind of guy. More of a subway and rusty four-banger type.

Today, however, North America's only truly solvent car giant announced it would reduce the price of the gas-electric hybrid version of its MKZ sedan to that of its normal gas-only version, a car that uses twice as much gasoline.

Even if you have no intention of ever driving a Lincoln, that's exciting news.

At least it is to someone like me, who believes that markets and technology can help solve the climate change crisis.

I am on the record saying that technology will save us from running out of oil and I remain hopeful that, when combined with economic forces, it will save us from turning the planet into a slow-cook oven as well.

The Lincoln decision is emblematic of how this will be done. And it involves productivity of a different kind than what you hear about most often.

The energy paradigm

Karl Marx insisted that labour was the key ingredient in everything we use.

In his view, a Lincoln MKZ, for example, would be made not just of the labour of the workers who built it, but also of all the labour that went into the creation of the capital that went into the purchase of the materials and the hiring of the workers, traced back as far as you want to imagine.

Unveiled at the New York auto show in March 2010, the new Lincoln hybrid will be priced the same as its gas-only sister vehicle, Ford announced in July. (Seth Wenig/Associated Press)

That was why Marx said everything really belongs to labour. But in economics, paradigm is everything.

In the modern economy, a similar chicken-and-egg case can be made for energy.

As the ecologist Jared Diamond reminds us, depressingly, in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, all the things we enjoy, from fresh water to food can be measured, and even priced, by their energy content.

Every millilitre of water we use has to be pumped into our homes using some kind of energy. Every bushel of wheat is farmed with tractors that run on gas and oil, and is shipped by oil-burning trains, trucks and boats.

Now, much has been made of late by economists and government ministers of how Canada needs to boost its productivity.

By that they generally mean labour productivity. For us all to be collectively richer, they say, we must learn to use labour efficiently.

The logic is that if you are very clever and make valuable goods with only a little bit of labour, those highly skilled and educated workers earn more per hour for the Canadian economy.

Theoretically that makes every Canadian richer, as we share the wealth our economy creates.

Energy productivity

But once again, the same logic can be used for energy, as the McKinsey Global Institute suggests in its study of what it calls energy productivity.

Until recently, industry has been notoriously wasteful of the energy it uses.

I remember being shocked when I visited an unheated lumber mill where each worker had a huge electric element behind his back radiating heat into the great outdoors, while trying to keep the employee warm.

Once companies and countries begin to think of energy productivity the way they have always thought of labour productivity, they discover they can save a fortune.

Just like insulating your roof, companies have realized that low-tech energy efficiency can often pay for itself in savings in months, not years.

The high-tech stuff is trickier. Which is why the Lincoln story is so exciting.

Game changer

Noble goals such as creating a solar economy are fraught with enormous difficulties.

Pay-back times can be decades. The first adopters, the trailblazers, probably never get their money back at all.

Their payoff for the hours they spend tinkering amid endless expenses comes from the same kind of geeky satisfaction that people, usually guys, get from building perfect model train sets in their basements.

To make high-tech solutions truly practical requires a huge amount of effort, taking the technology from the land of geeks to the land of everyday.

It's a huge endeavour, as many of the early computer geeks discovered, requiring not just complex technology, but social change, the effort of thousands of companies and millions of consumers willing to buy in.

Then there's price.

New technology is always more expensive at first, which means that as well as convincing people of the need to shake up their comfortable existence, you must also demand that they pay extra for the privilege.

When Toyota brought out its first hybrid Prius, it was brilliant technology. But the car was small, its reliability was completely unknown and it was expensive.

Most calculations showed that the savings in gas would never pay off, even if you kept it until the wheels fell off.

But with the Lincoln announcement, the landscape has changed.

Technology has not truly arrived until it is known, reliable and cheaper than the existing alternative. When that happens, you can wave the previous system goodbye.

The brilliance of Ford's Lincoln MKZ is that it has now crossed that barrier.

The pay-back time for energy savings falls to zero. It is a magic moment in the quest for energy productivity.

Ford is setting a precedent. It is not a solution, but it points in a direction. Perhaps a trend.

It reminds us that no matter how overwhelming, once we put our collective minds to a problem, there are solutions.