(if you don't know at all, that's entirely different; situational awareness is invaluable)
The amount of people who work in "startups" but actually work for government funded accelerators, investment funds that only invest in Shopify, government jobs relating to startup R&D, as opposed to actual startups, is shocking.
That free college for enby First Nations students? The new Montreal REM? Don't ask how they're paid for.
(1) China is going to do it, so the United States is going to do it, so the EU is going to do it, ...
(2) Really the world should just enforce a carbon tax of $50-100 a ton and rebate it to make it revenue neutral. In that case market mechanisms would be harnessed to develop a post-fossil fuel economy. It's conceivable such a mechanism would be perceived as "fair" in one country but it would be so fraught when the global north and south would be involved. The global south would want to be paid reparations for colonization, whereas the north would see the money being stolen and pissed away by governments and well-positioned individuals in the south: the south doesn't have the institutions to be able to received such a windfall. It wouldn't get so far, however, with voters in the south, who would be opposed to such a thing on the basis of simple racism.
It is much more palatable therefore to promote decarbonization through random subsidization projects like the above despite all the problems they entail.
How does that work, again?
No one country can do it alone. It's a cop-out that it is simply a problem of the global north because if you add up emissions from developing countries it is a lot
https://www.cgdev.org/media/developing-countries-are-respons...
If a zone like the US or the EU imposes a carbon tax but some other zone such as China, does not, it will perceive unfair competition. Already everybody in global trade thinks the situation is unfair (This situation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws that dominated UK politics in 1850 still dominates world politics today and is the real reason why the WTO hasn't recovered from "The Battle of Seattle")
It is the mother of all
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
and the answer we seem to have chosen is ecological collapse and die-off. Whoever is left behind is going to turn their backs on everything our civilization stands for (look how Rome's literature was purposefully destroyed;) it would be hopeful that people would embrace some kind of governance to deal with global problems by then but which much fewer people those problems might not seem so salient and that rejection might be more fundamental than that.
What do you mean by “pretend economy”? When I look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada and consider Canada’s ranking across a broad range of metrics, it looks pretty real to me.
> It's just government money sloshing around, giving us the appearance of participating in various industries
Whence does this money hail?
Not the parent, but a guess: natural resources extraction?
But it doesn’t seem to change the underpinnings. Resource led countries develop power structures around these resources and it doesn’t seem that Canada is immune to that. This affects the economy.
In addition to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada (linked above), Investopedia further clarifies that Canada's top industries are [1]:
- Real Estate, Rental, Leasing
- Manufacturing
- Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction (representing 15.1% of GDP, for the 12 months ending 2021)
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042315/funda...
I've heard Canada described as three mining companies standing on each other wearing an overcoat.