The Green War on Clean Energy
city-journal.org
city-journal.org
Solar is not being used by general population because installation costs are high, with battery even higher and then it is usable only during the summer and you need to be connected to the grid, because you would run out of energy during winter. Additionally you need space for solar installation, which is kind of hard to get when you are living in an apartment, as 50% of Europeans do.
I am not willing to find more examples. It was the first fossil fuel project that came to my mind and after minimal googling i found there was massive government support. However even just googling returns results which disprove your assertion https://odi.org/en/press/europe-providing-more-than-112-bill....
Incredibly frustrating and undermines the point because it allows the shills to dismiss them out of hand and lump in the real subsidies.
Cars paying for a small fraction of the infrastructure they use via fuel tax isn't the slam dunk you think it is. It's actually just another example of subsidy because much of the roads, and parking, and port facilities and pipelines are paid for by vat and income tax. With further communal resources being spent via space reserved on every private and commercial property for the benefit of cars such as setbacks and parking minimums.
A tiny fraction of the public resources we have spent on fossil fuels, and later nuclear could have completed a green transition at any time in the last century.
What XR is doing is counterproductive as normal folks will just label them as deranged ecoterrorists living in their parent's basement and have no idea how real world works and that bills needs to be paid or you will end up on the streets.
Only thing which XR is doing is to raise anger when moderate greens will try to come up with rational policies. They can't. XR already turned it into emotionally charged debate.
The press chooses the labelling, depending on who they support. We can see this with things like the Canadian trucker convoy who are "terrorists" or "freedom fighters" depending on which media you consume.
People are then getting angry. In discussions, on social media in regular conversations, because they don't understand purpose of such actions - targeting commuting civilians because government does not do what they want.
Let's hope the art can survive the 4C warming then.
The "no change, cheapest option only" view has long term consequences which will also be bad for people. This is why "red-green" politics is such a common match: there will be costs, but we need to ensure they are borne by people who can afford them.
The underlying assumption of the author, which is so naively incorrect as to almost surely be in bad faith, is that groups like XR have the ultimate goal or function of taking over the apparatus of government (or society or whatever) and implementing an agenda. Their ultimate goal is to exert pressure on the policy and societal paradigms by pushing against broad assumptions that nobody else in the space is willing to challenge.
One thing that is mentioned here is degrowth. That's a great example: We have activists saying that if the precept of infinite economic growth is getting in the way of the climate goal, we should reconsider our assumptions about growth. This is a key element to honest intellectual/political discourse but it doesn't map onto a policy at all. An idea is that in some later political cycle, we will have a decision-maker who studied degrowth and found it more persuasive than yolo capitalism and fashions a responsive policy platform.
Articles like this are akin to an argument that we should close universities because people can't eat books. Return to farming! It's the only thing guaranteed to put food on the table!