Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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"Crashing the economy" is literally the worst thing you could do to fix climate change.

Even in a stagnant economy, people are still commuting to and from work in their gas-guzzling cars, and heating their homes in the winter. CO2 emissions aren't going to change a ton.

But what a stagnant economy does is prevent any kind of investment in renewable energy and electrification, because there's no excess money to use for investment. A stagnant economy is not installing solar panels, replacing ICE cars with electric and installing new charging stations nationwide, or replacing boilers with heat pumps.

And if we want to hasten the changes to renewable energy and electrification, that's what government policy is for -- via subsidies for desired technologies, heavier taxation for undesired ones, and regulation.

"Crashing the economy" to slow down climate change is like cutting university faculty by half in order to combat grade inflation. It doesn't make any sense.

You don't need private investment to do electrification and renewable energy. That can be done by the government. Which doesn't have funding problems, ever.

The government isn't inventing electric cars or improving heat pumps or improving batteries or making solar panels more efficient to produce.

You absolutely still need private investment in a growing economy to produce and invent these technologies.

What the government incentives then can do is speed up their rates of adoption and installation. But you need both sides -- public and private.

The government is literally doing that by funding research. The government can fund literally anything it wants to. Private investment is literally never necessary.

What you're describing is a command economy of the type the Soviet Union had -- no private investment.

The whole history the twentieth century is the evidence that such a system doesn't work. And it especially doesn't work as technology has become increasingly complex.

Markets are vastly better-informed investors than governments can ever be. Which is why it's generally vastly better for governments to skew incentives for private investment to favor a particular area, rather than make investments directly.

No, that's not what I'm describing. Stop putting your ideological spin on my words.

The government doesn't need the private sector, it allows the private sector to exist where it's deemed beneficial.

The rise of the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) to become the largest sector in the US economy (22+%) coincides with an increase in proportion of private R&D expenditure compared to government expenditure. In 2010 businesses spend $248 billion on R&D while the government spent $126 billion. In 2021 that number was $587 billion compared to $153 billion. In other words, the share of Business R&D went from 66% of R&D spend to about 80%.

The reason this is not a good trend is that the KIND of R&D businesses do vs government are very different. Government invests in basic research and invention while business invests in innovation.

Less money is going into science and more into squeezing money out of people via innovation. I would argue this is because the sector that makes all the important decisions is now the FIRE sector, which only thinks about the next quarter.

source: https://ncses.nsf.gov/data-collections/national-patterns/202...

Late USSR had funding problems. Crashed due to having them. So governments have funding problems too.

You may also ask Argentine.

Where do you think the government gets its funding from? And no, you can't just print your way out of this.

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