Cool. If we had a working tax code, we wouldn't need billionaires' charity and could actually regulate carbon in the atmosphere instead of these sort of band-aids and PR stunts.
You have a solution for climate change which is a price on carbon i.e. a pure market driven mechanism.
But in this case they universally hate it and instead prefer the government hand out subsidies and bonuses.
The problem is "concentrated pain, diffuse benefits." Putting a price on emissions is an existential threat to businesses based on fossil fuel extraction or combustion. It's a nice-to-have for businesses that provide alternatives to fossil energy, like solar installers. For most other businesses it's not a key issue either way. This is similar to how most American businesses would be happy-to-indifferent about the existence of municipal broadband services, but private providers of broadband services fiercely oppose that option.
https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Initiative_1631,_Carbon_E...
But calling businesses hypocrites is being unfair - there is already a hypothetical market for carbon emissions where the price is $0. The government is going to drive the price up to something high enough that it will change business behavior, by extension causing businesses losses.
They aren't doing anything unreasonable, government steps in, value disappears. They're being completely reasonable by venting and asking for some sort of compensation. Asking for that compensation in the form of a subsidy is selfish, but once the government gets involved all bets are off, so why not aim for the stars and see what they can wrangle?
* $1,280 per coffee cup: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/10/22/ai...
* $1.2 trillion to “modernize” the US nuclear arsenal and production facilities: https://billmoyers.com/story/the-trillion-dollar-question-th...
* $38 billion in "defense aid" to a foreign country: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/florida-jewish-journal/fl-jj-us...
$40 billion per year for 30 years would be an amazing bargain to help to continue to maintain peace between the US, China, Russia, UK, France, India, etc. Outside of the fantasy scenario where everyone simultaneously gets rid of their nukes and nobody else ever develops them.
Why is it $40 billion a year? I'm not a Musk fan per say but it is the closest analog... you can buy almost 2 SpaceX's (the entire company) a year for that and I highly doubt modernizing the nuclear infrastructure is that much more complicated than R&D on a brand new space company.
Some of us don't necessarily disagree we need to spend money on defense. But we think the amount being spent is way more than should be reasonably necessary to get the job done.
People like to criticize people who want to cut military budgets never asking if maybe we should just fire a bunch of people at the top who are inflating all the costs and replace them with people incentivized to get us more for less money.
This is a totally reasonable way to run government budgets and not insane at all! /s