Yep I'd agree that's too simple, altho there are a couple of 'entrenched interests' that do tie in to the topic I'd say...
We are all in a 'carbon economy' - that's an entrenched reality, and of great economic interest to many big players. It's also what makes the alternative energy industries only minorly compelling to the political & investment worlds (IE they provide a degree of 'energy independence', & some alternate routes into a saturated market, but are still a huge R&D jump away from providing a genuine alternative).
This is all true, but isn't being in a "carbon economy" just another way of saying we don't have a viable alternative yet? Meaning, there's no businessman who likes emitting carbon more than they like money. Nobody's sticking to fossil fuels for the sake of nostalgia, or just because they're used to it.
The distinction here is that everyone struggles to factor in the substantial future cost associated with carbon. Will carbon-company shareholders be living near a flooded coastal plain? (Well, the company can't be sued for that). Will food prices rise in arid areas where they currently operate? (Well yeah, but they could switch their infrastructure from oil delivery to water by that stage). And on.
I've been facetious there, but even if the science could give us precise models of expected changes, which it currently struggles to, I think we'd still see plenty of short-term shareholder-pleasing in terms of sucking that last bit of profit out of these admittedly profit-riven carbon realms.
I'd say that's possible, yeah. At least in the sense that such things theoretically be both detrimental and not something that incentives can properly motivate people to prevent. But that, I think, is precisely the problem: if there are few incentives, it's because there's a lot of uncertainty. And if there's a lot of uncertainty, it pretty majorly undermines the government proposing any one course of action. All the things that prevent business from "seeing" this problem in a risk/reward sense are the same things that prevent government from being any better at it. In other words, I think it's possible (perhaps even better) to make a climate change argument that totally believes in it, totally think it's a threat, and still totally regards the market as the most likely entity to respond and adjust promptly.
But anyway, clearly it's not good business now, with the information we have now, which brings me back to the admit-its-not-good-business-but-do-it-anyway thing. Which people have been loathe to do, because I think they suspect it isn't a winning position, right or wrong.
I'd disagree with the absolutely. They certainly have their supplementary roles even in the 'business as usual' scenario. But certainly we should admit that alt-energy sources mainly perform worse that carbon norms, with the key exception of 'likelihood to flood your grandchildren's living room'
A fair reigning in; I probably overshot it with the "absolutely." I should say that they
clearly make less business sense than the alternative at this point in time, which I suppose is different than "absolutely" in that the latter implies some kind of total difference, rather than just a fairly obvious one. There are lots of benefits to it.
I kind of liked the McCain tack, where he said the worst-case scenario of some such policy was that we leave our children a cleaner world. I think that argument can be used in service of a much larger intervention than makes sense (if any does), but I think for certain smaller measures it represents an interesting angle. Because, as I said before, we all want that, it's just a matter of whether or not we should be compelled, and whether or not that would be effective even if it's warranted.
Yep absolutely agree on this. (With the caveat that I think there has been a lot of government cash flung at the 'mini sun' fushion tech that's been in development for decades
)
Yeah, fusion was just some random example. Take your pick on that front; it can be tricky to find an alternative energy source the government
hasn't flung some money at at some point. Which is kind of horrifying because it means, if
any of them end up being "the" alternative, we'll have definitely spent tons of money crowding out its growth by funding all the others. The whole process is pretty sloppy and more than a little frantic, and I think savvy businesses are taking advantage of it. Just look at ethanol for a textbook example of how screwed up government can make energy issues. It now seems beyond dispute that our policies there have caused people to literally starve in other countries, for what was essentially no benefit towards the stated goal. Not to mention the influence the policy gave Iowa over the Presidential races, which has surely skewed our politics further in ways we can't possibly detect.
I will say that I'm super skeptical of a few of the options--wind, in particular--ever being viable. The math involved in terms of square footage is absolutely obscene, for example. We're talking wind farms the size of a few states, or some other such insanity.
Biggest potential for common ground, I think: Nuclear. It'll require a big group effort to get over the deaths-in-chunks fear, which always scares people more than other industries where people die all the time, but steadily and not all at once, but if we can get over that I think it represents the most promising option, by far. It's the only solution that exists now that looks even remotely scalable.