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Comment by MrBuddyCasino | Hacker News Reader

US entrepreneurism kickstarted the electric vehicle transition (thx Elon1). Batteries prices are falling. PV is already incredibly cheap and getting cheaper. Coal is becoming increasingly uncompetitive. Nuclear is making a comeback, also thanks to US entrepreneurs.

Science, Capitalism and entrepreneurship will be the unstoppable force that will solve our energy crisis, if western governments let them.

Africa, India and China will be the biggest factors going forward.

UPDATE: To be clear, I'm not arguing for laissez-faire capitalism. Government incentives are required to develop markets, as Germany did with PV, and US does with EV. My point is that the US being part of the Climate Accord or not won't matter much, the move away from coal and ICE cars is inevitable due to already existing market forces. A bigger lever would be to de-regulate nuclear where it makes sense, as that is where the biggest cost lie.

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> Science, Capitalism and entrepreneurship will be the unstoppable force that will solve our energy crisis, if western governments let them.

Yes, everybody knows that EVs received precisely zero government subsidy in terms of R&D, business loans, and consumer rebates. That free market did it all by itself. And we've got what... 1% of the cars on the road running on electric?

You under appreciate Obama's administration push towards renewables.

Yep. I think it's reasonable to think that Tesla wouldn't be where it is today without the nearly half a billion dollars it was loaned by the federal government in 2010.

https://www.energy.gov/lpo/tesla

Capitalism and enterpreneurship is how we got here in the first place. Elon and renewables are only becoming a thing because of economic incentives from governments - positive incentives in the form of subsidies on e.g. new EVs, solar panels, etc, and negative incentives in the form of carbon taxes.

Take those away and the "green" companies would have NO incentive to push their work. They'd be working with people wanting to do better first and foremost, and then they would - ironically - be competing with petrol and energy companies, who also have "green" all over their marketing.

Renewables and EVs could not compete without government incentives.

I'd actually argue that the lack of a carbon tax - not its existence - is an incentive, since you're not charging for the negative externality of trashing the atmosphere.

I don´t know why people overvalue Musk an Tesla that much for reducing emissions. When I ran the numbers last year, a single city in China(Guangzhou) was enough to reduce emissions more than entire Tesla sales, just by replacing all of their busses with electrical ones.

Isn't that exactly what government incentives are for? Subsidize the thing you want to see succeed, until it no longer needs subsidizing.

Of course, that is the ideal success scenario, in the failure scenario, you subsidize the thing until it fails, or until you can no longer afford to subsidize it.

EDIT: grammar

Of course. The point is that it is ridiculous to use Tesla as evidence that the free market will solve our problems when

1. Tesla's impact on global emissions is minimal.

2. Government intervention in EVs has been there from the start.

The charitable conclusion is that governments and markets can work together. The pessimistic conclusion is that markets are only capable of putting lipstick on pigs.

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