Put another way, shouldn't news of any new option be good?
It's interesting then that there's such negativity, or at least ambiguity, in this thread. Is it because we've grown more pessimistic at the irresponsibility of society?
I am wondering if anyone will mention "peak oil" here too :)
Just now goverment is about to be thrown because (at least from my somewhat biased understanding) they insist that any extra income from climate taxes on fuel are distributed back to the population in the form of tax breaks or cheaper train tickets :-/
Until then, the money coming in from taxation is going to be used somewhere, and it seems a shame to use it somewhere that doesn't benefit anyone.
When someone develops cheap, plentiful, clean energy at scale, oil will be made redundant. The free market is all about innovation and achieving a competitive advantage.
Maybe you should check your cold war mindset whereby pointing out a limitation of the free market necessarily gets a response about the USSR. As though that were literally the only possible alternative.
To recap:
ori_b: How to disincentivize fossil fuel use? [a current policy goal]
briandear: The free market! All we need is magical energy tech that doesn't exist yet and makes oil obsolete overnight, haha.
me: The free market actually doesn't solve the externality problem.
you: The USSR wasn't perfect either!
This is why I was happy last year when gas taxes were raised and the money fed back to cut taxes and help reduce ticket prices.
We've seen it time and time again; the free market is prone to the same short-sightedness as the rest of the human race. It will continue advancing in exactly the same way until it is either forced to change or eats itself whole, except instead of a depression we will face extinction.
I freely admit for myself - it seems rather a cold and .. Vulcan way of looking at it, but what other choice is there?
It's humanity that is short-sighted ( because of time pressure in decision processes causing things like hyperbolic discounting )and free markets reflect that, as would any thinking other than purest central planning.
We're back to "no straight thing was ever constructed from the crooked timber of humanity." Trying to ... sawmill it straight has a pretty poor track record.
Meanwhile, the hydrocarbon industry sowed the wind by drinking the zero-coupon bond Kool-Aid and will reap the whirlwind.
I'm not sure there's anything more worthless than purely theorical econ, if you assume perfectly spherical cows in a vacuum all economic systems will end up at the same point and it doesn't really matter which one you pick.
> We're back to "no straight thing was ever constructed from the crooked timber of humanity." Trying to ... sawmill it straight has a pretty poor track record.
And yet that's the entire point of political and economic system, if you unmoor the system from the "crooked timber of humanity" it has no application.
It's important to understand the limitations of such things.
The free market cares nothing about externalities unless it's forced to.
> When someone develops cheap, plentiful, clean energy at scale, oil will be made redundant.
Case in point. And you're ignoring oil companies fighting tooth and nail to avoid that situation.
> The free market is all about innovation and achieving a competitive advantage.
The free market is about making money. An excellent to do that is to suppress innovation so that your product remains relevant.
The argument is not whether the goal is reasonable, but whether are money is play. With carbon credits, there certainly are, and a lot of it.
> As for relying on taxpayer-financed investments, that's exactly what tax money is meant to be used for.
Nope, it's exactly what tax money are not meant to be used for. Tax money should be used to protect the citizens, to provide for law enforcement, defense, common infrastructure, taking care of the poor and ill. High-risk venture investment is not what it should be used for. That's what private VCs are for. And if VCs wouldn't want to touch it with ten-foot pole, maybe there's a reason for that.
> Tesla is the golden standard of using government loans efficiently, for the betterment of society, and even paying them back in full ahead of schedule!
Exactly because they profited so much out of "green credits" mandate, effectively taxing owners of all other cars to their advantage. Getting hundreds of millions by government mandate is a pretty sweet deal, especially if their direct competitors have to pay it.
VCs are glorified gamblers. I think you need to take a good look at how advanced science and technology has been done since there is science and technology; you'll quickly realize it always has direct or indirect government backing - because market itself doesn't exactly favour anything more long-term than your next quarterly report.
> effectively taxing owners of all other cars to their advantage
If that was true, I'd actually be pretty happy about it - about time someone made polluters pay for the externalities. But this isn't true, in fact it's government who decides that certain areas of technology (like green energy, green transportation) should be developed further, and offers loans and grants as a way of incentivizing companies to work in those areas.
So instead of gambling with the money from affluent people, given voluntarily, we should gamble with tax money, taken coercively from much poorer people, competing with budgets for welfare, hospitals, schools, etc. - and gamble with that. Brilliant.
> because market itself doesn't exactly favour anything more long-term than your next quarterly report.
It's bullcrap, easily disproven by existance of multiple companies with hundred-year histories. And existance of whole divisions in those companies doing long-term projects.
> If that was true,
What you mean "if"? That's a fact. Easily verifyable. Tesla sells credits to other auto-makers. It has been reported many times and widely known.
Also, I thinking there's enough good momentum towards use of alt energy resources, that we're going the right direction.
What, you thought this community was better? That smart people are smart?
Sorry - smart people are stupid too - their mistakes are just bigger. Who do you think designed the nazi war machine, idiots? Was Speer a dullard?
No. intelligent people believe just as much stupid crap as the next man. They choose to ignore their education in favour of emotion.
Yarr, down she goes. Creatures which dwell under rocks dislike the light.
The scientific consensus is that global warming is real. Climate change is happening now. The debate is about the details: how much warming there will be, how fast, and what the effects will be. This is a normal part of science, and how it's supposed to work. Regardless of the details, at this point, it is pretty clear by now that we are screwed even if we aren't quite sure how badly.
As far as I can tell, the only spin comes from idiot politicians invested in the status quo.
The thing we need is for people to stop countering the change out of their short-term interest in lining their own pockets.
Not until we have an order-of-magnitude breakthrough in battery tech or some new form of storage
Germany raised it's electricity price almost 3 times since it started it's riddiculous renewable energy bs and they still are only ~25% renewables (And they offshored their heavy, energy intensive industry that just packed up and moved to China, to happily pollute even more than before)
There you have it. This is a viable alternative that's safe, and green.
Germany did exactly the wrong thing IMO. They should've expanded their nuclear capacity instead of shutting off perfectly good plans and starting to pollute the world (proxying through China, as you say).
In our world, the one making the choice may not be the one adversely affected. There may be disagreement about the best action. There may be unavoidable risks.
Examples: thermonuclear war, global warming, predatory lending, biological weapons...
Consider a hypothetical doomsday device that could be developed in a garage. The "all options are a net good" principle is just not a very useful one in practice.
We've always been pessimistic about human nature. Advancing technology raises the stakes.