Energy subsidies for vulnerable people are an option that negates your only argument against the most sane option of switching to renewable and nuclear ASAP, at least in extremely wealthy countries like the USA.
"As a society, every extra dollar spent on pricier energy is an extra dollar that can’t go to social programs, or to new start up, or anywhere."
I am not buying it, energy is cheap, so we waste it by shipping a pair of jeans three times across the world, to deliver fast fashion the consumer needs, so that on average they can wear some low quality bullshit made woth slave labour 7 times and then throw it away, to be shipped into some poor country for 'recycling' and have it end up in the ocean.
Or catch shrimp near our shores, ship it to philipines to be peeled, and then shipping it back.
Passivehaus standard was developed decades ago, it is several times better than the maximim energy efficiency rating in UK of 'A+'. The number of houses that meet either of these standard is a fucking 0%. Check newbuilds in Uk, half of then can't manage energy rating of C, its, disgracefull! Almost none of them have a heat recovery ventilation system or a heat pump.
We waste 20-30% of energy we generate on heating leaky homes.
My parents used to buy groceries at the market by weight, today a 300 g steak comes with 200g plastic packaging. 70% of my trash is plapackaging. The recycling rate is 9%. Efficient free market my ass.
The only place I know that sells food without plastic us an hour travel away, it's a hipster place with organic-artisian authentic beans at 1,000% markup. There is nobody who sells milk in a container I could return to them when it's empty, mo matter how much I pay.
What bancrupts an average consumer? Unaffordable housing, education and healthcare. None of these things are dictated by energy price.
> If you are arguing to stop subsidies for fossil fuels, sure! Let's do it.
I'll be all in on that. That's not my point at all.
> Without any subsidies and with externalities accounted for, fossil fuels would be even more expensive than renewables.
Wow, slow down there.
First, subsidies are a confounding factor. I don't care who signs the check, we're all paying for it in one way or another. Let's just assume we join all of the worlds wealth into a big pot somehow, and can magically distribute it as we desire.
Externalities are important though, because we will pay them anyway, so that one counts.
LCOE for solar and wind is lower, but we can't build a whole network with wind and solar because they're unreliable. The "popular" (hyped) solution is storage, but storage is so expensive that the LCOE for Solar/Wind + Storage blows us through the roof again!
I'd love to have some real solution, a renewable and reliable source with LCOE similar to natural gas, but until we have one we need to accept the fact that natural gas is in our mixture of energy sources is a good thing.
If trillions weren't being spent on useless military purposes, you would have a point. Also, a good amount of money in the economy is wasted on stuff like new iPhones every year, bigger cars, plastic crap, Bitcoin GPUs, huge data centers for better ads, etc.
There's plenty of room for a reduction in consumption with minimal impact on lifestyle in the developed world.
Many would claim that every extra dollar spent on renewables is reducing the environmental debt that we’ve accumulated, that we have to will pay for, with very real dollars, since we’ve subsidize our energy cost with future remediation costs.
You can explain or justify the costs however you like. That's not the issue. I'm not making any claims as to the suitability of spending more or less into renewables, just pointing the obvious but often forgotten consequence, that every dollar spent here is a dollar you can't spend in another place.
Swapping to renewables at once would have an impact that can very easily overshadow any remediation costs. Even tiny cost increases now will produce vast difference 100 years forward due to compounding.
Just as a thought experiment, if the costs of switching to renewable energy are >0.72% of GDP, and the remedial costs are around 18T$ (in today's money) in 100 years, you're still better off not switching to renewables.
Every extra dollar saved on cheaper energy actually goes to lining some billionaire's pockets in some untaxed hole. And then eventually the people who would benefit from said social program will instead have to pay back a climate debt in the future.
If we are going to just made up magic pockets where infinite money lies, then we can justify whatever we please.
The point of my comment is that it doesn't matter where the money is. Even if you were to pay it through massive taxes to the rich (assume no loopholes, no funny accounting tricks possible), the ones picking up the tab are the poor people of the future, because even if all millionaires are evil movie villains, taking their money will hurt growth, and growth compounds. Reducing growth now can be a catastrophe when compounded over 100, 200, 500 years.
This growth fallacy is the main thing driving so much environmental destruction in the first place. Most effort is being wasted on churn rather than creating advancement, and this is increasing as time goes on (fake jobs). Until we reprioritize the economy to make efficiency gains translate into leisure gains, talking about "growth" is just cover for business as usual.
