IronRanger

That is the political justification but several studies have found that the benefits flow mostly to the wealthy. If you are poor in a 3rd world country, you cannot afford a car.

This study from 2012 shows the top 20% get 43% of the benefit, the bottom 20% only 7%:

https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/05/09/real-co...

Moreover these subsidy schemes are hugely expensive, and the money is better used elsewhere - eg. education, family planning, clean infrastructure.

There are still countries around the world which subsidise fossil fuels. Not indirect subsidies like exporation writeoffs for corporations, but actual incentives for consumers to consume in the form of below-market pricing.

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/value-of-foss...

And even without subsidies, petrol and diesel are undertaxed in almost every country.

Properly taxing fossil fuel is surely a more cost-effective preliminary step compared to schemes like CCS.

And if that weight and cost budget was just used for batteries, instead of an engine and drivetrain, you'd get a much better electric vehicle.

Those people exist - they are called successful founders or senior executives.

The solution is to tax vehicles by weight, and time and location of use.

Melbourne, the State Capital of Victoria, has a big problem with congestion at peak hours.

If road use charging like in Singapore or London was introduced, it would shift usage to non-peak hours, and raise sufficient revenue to offset fuel excise.

But that's politically difficult - whereas applying a tax to EVs, which currently very few people use, is much easier.

Is this a symbol of the degradation of human intellectual capability in the 21st century?

According to the statistics from Sweden and Germany, 2020 deaths are tracking the same as prior years, and the death spike in Sweden from COVID is about the same as the 2009 Swine flu pandemic.

So in regions with reasonably healthy people, its not clear that COVID is actually more deadly than the regular seasonal viruses we have been dealing with for the past few decades.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-...

The purpose is gatekeeping, and setting a minimum basis of quality. If the annual fee was $0/year developers would be worse off due to the flood of low-quality applications.

This is exactly what happened on Steam when the platform was opened to anything for a $100 submission fee - quality tanked and revenues even for established Indie developer have declined significantly.

Moon dust is basically like asbestos:

https://www.businessinsider.com/moon-dust-is-toxic-2012-7

Instead of lockdown, why don't Governments issue free Vitamin D to all households and at all pharamcies, all winter? The cost would be a few million - against tens of billions for lockdown.

Its also a motivator behind Brexit - regain some control over who comes in and out.

We'll have to wait for annual death statistics for the final answer.

So far, Sweden's annual deaths are tracking the same as prior years:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

The scientific evidence seems to indicate no net effect on annual deaths from lockdown, when comparing Sweden vs Norway though:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.11.20229708v...

Indeed Sweden's annual deaths are shaping up much like prior years, and COVID deaths now are in the low single digits, against about 250 people who die every day in Sweden from any cause.

Sub-replacement fertility is a factor of housing costs. Immigration drives down wages, and increases housing costs, making housing less affordable. All that immigration serves to accomplish is population replacement.