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Comment by leni536 | Hacker News Reader

> I'd rather pay more now for solar, than pay through the nose later for the environmental equivalent of a triple bypass surgery.

That's really generous, however I think it would be the government's duty to compensate for these externalities so you don't have to pay more for solar (or not much more) than for the grid. Otherwise the environment will just stay a huge "tragedy of the commons".

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The very least the governments can do is eliminate all subsidies to coal, oil and natural gas. They've had them for decades. I don't think it's healthy for a society to prop up an industry that long with subsidies, especially when it's one of the most profitable.

Australia had a carbon tax. Unfortunately it has been reverted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Australia

A politician can make any kind of spending seem bad by just calling it a subsidy regardless of the social benefit. But when it benefits people they like it can just be quietly ignored.

The real test should be if it ensures that people pay a "fair price" for a product. Paying a little more for clean energy is perfectly reasonable.

> The real test should be if it ensures that people pay a "fair price" for a product. Paying a little more for clean energy is perfectly reasonable.

You could argue the other way and say that paying a little more for dirty energy is perfectly reasonable because someone has to come after them to clean things up. There is a cost to that.

Price manipulation in the market in any direction will end up providing an edge for someone to extract value / reduce the fairness to consumers.

Outside of very short term smoothing effects from strategic reserves, "fair price" raises some troubling price-fixing flags, for me.

Especially when those industries are killing us. Imagine government subsidies of cigarettes or heroin.

Could you list the subsidies you're against? All I ever find is general business items or for non-conventional fuels.

This isn't what people normally mean when they refer to subsidies, but the fact that fossil fuel users are allowed to contaminate everyone's air is effectively a massive subsidy for their operations. If the cost of the CO2 and pollution were paid by those producing it, this stuff would be way more expensive.

The IMF recently published a working paper[1] on energy subsidies at global and regional levels that might be of interest. They do use an fairly broad definition of what counts as a subsidy (including cost of damages environmental damages and global warming effect of CO2 emissions).

[1] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=42940.0

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/18/fossil-fu...

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