I’m not sure what you think is in “my interest” in this case, but I genuinely don’t understand what you’re trying to get at and asked you the following question to try to clarify:
Are you claiming that the OP is making this claim about a singular critic, perhaps named “Green Left”? Or do you think it’s at least possible that “the Green Left” refers to more than one person?
I think it would be more productive to answer my simple and straight-forward questions so that I can understand where you’re coming from with your criticism than to accuse me of having nefarious secret motives.
For the companies investing, or the banks making loans, or whatever, then yes, they are. And If they lose, we’ll know how good the idea was. This is one case where I actually do think the market, while ridiculously distorted, is likely to be overly conservative rather than overly optimistic.
I think I was being unclear. Given that the companies in question are relying on subsidies derived from taxes, I’m actually saying they’re not risking their own billions. I also think that in e.g. Germany, fossil fuel-based electricity producers are investing in wind and solar not because they think it’s a good idea, but because the wind and solar industry is crashing wholesale electricity prices causing them to lose money (but regulations prevent them from closing money-losing plants that are needed to off-set the intermittency of wind and solar-based producers) – effectively forcing them to invest in wind and solar.
In countries where the regulations don’t heavily incentivize/subsidize wind and solar, we see much lower investment and much slower growth in those industries.
But to understand the issue I guess I’d need some real numbers so I’ll keep looking for better sources. Cheers!
It seemed to me that Cory was just pointing out that “reduce the human population by 50%” is too simple a formulation, one that leads a small subset of the “green left” into promoting genocidal solutions that are out of line with most progressive thought.
Although he doesn’t state it, Cory understands that the bulk of real opposition in this country to more nuanced approaches of any sort comes not from a fringe group on the left but from conservatives and Libertarians.
People who will do anything to avoid having their large exurban lots and McMansions and SUVs taken from them lest they feel less like Rugged Individualist millionaires are more likely to take on the Malthusian attitude that leads to fascist “solutions” for making sure only “deserving” humans get to enjoy the planet’s lebensraum.
Fair enough. If you want to eliminate market distortions, I’d happily give up every energy subsidy in existence in exchange for a price on CO2 emissions that accurately reflected the amount of damage they cause. I expect the result of that would be significantly more favorable to renewables investment (and possibly nuclear) than any country’s subsidies today.
Personally I am on the utopian side of the green left. We don’t need to have a human mass die off and we don’t need to go back to pre-industrial times. What we can’t do though is carry on as we are now.
Ours were (and are) used a lot. There are playgrounds for kids and seating for adults watching them, and pitches for ball play for older kids. The forest patches are also popular for walking and playing. I would just wander around and look for birds and squirrels, but then I was a strange kid. When I was a teenager there was also a youth club and a youth outreach team which were both very popular but later conservative city councils shut most of those down and left the remainder to cater for a much larger area than they had been. Not sure where teenagers are supposed to hang out these days.
Well, you may be prepared to shelve our $15/gal but tens of millions of working people in the US certainly aren’t. So absent significant “market distortions” pushing investment in mass transit, removing energy subsidies would be significantly problematic. https://www.fastcompany.com/1762661/true-price-gas-what-it-should-really-cost-fill
Everything would cost more, in proportion to how polluting it is. That money would become taxes. I realize that, in practice, this would be used (in the US at least) to bless the rich with more riches. But if I’m already living in the “price carbon accurately” fantasy world, I may as well also live in the “Use excess tax windfalls to benefit the working class and the poor” fantasy world.
