It’s just too expensive to save the planet. I’m glad that our governments were making the tough Choices, to continue burning coal and other fossil fuels because the economy just couldn’t handle the burden of not growing by another 5% every year.
That’s a fair complaint for developed countries, but I feel like it’s less fair for developing countries where each point of GDP growth has a tangible effect on poverty rates, education, health, economic mobility, and overall wellbeing. Hell, an increase in economic resources will probably even offset the decrease in crop yield from climate change. For countries that are still developing, these things improve the lives of citizens more than the impact of climate change would hurt them.
Living in a developed country, we have a disproportionate responsibility for both reducing our own emissions and developing the technology and infrastructure to reduce emissions for everyone else. We should have led the charge towards ever cheaper solar and ever cheaper wind. We should have given the world clean and cheap technologies they can use to fuel their industrialization to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. We haven’t, but looking towards the future there’s still a lot we can do.
Remember that you can influence global emissions far more than by bringing your personal emissions down to zero.
Yes, exactly, the developed world should aid the developing world as much as possible in providing them clean technologies.
We are rich enough. We can afford that. And we all benefit in the end (because, after all, a lot of our supplies originate from developing countries).
Yep just raise everyone’s taxes in the EU and US/Canada and give it to everybody else, sounds awesome.
Also worth remembering that governments are subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. What should happen is that this industry should be nationalized and the profits should be used to build out clean energy infrastructure.
The oil industry is on its death bed so I’m not against what you’re saying, but we’re currently subsidizing the green energy sector (a good thing) with nothing in return (a bad thing).
We should look to how Norway avoided Dutch Disease and taxed the hell out of private oil extraction. They subsidise the discovery (the risky part) and then slap a very heavy tax on the oil those companies then extract and sell, all the while having a national oil company they have to compete with it (crucial to keep oil expertise within the government).
Norway already taxes private wind energy and hydropower, because they know the oil industry will be dethroned by the green energy industry soon and don’t want to simply subsidize their profits. Norway also owns wind energy both domestically and in other countries (hilariously, they own more UK wind energy than the UK government itself does), and massive amounts of their domestic hydropower.
Had the misfortune of listening to State Department and White House policy ghouls talk to a class recently. They don’t believe moving to less fossil fuels quickly is viable because we’d become “dangerously dependent on Chinese minerals for batteries and solar cells” ignoring the fact that the entire globe is “dangerously dependent” on a liveable climate
