Slashdot Mirror
Study: Global Warming Solvable If Fossil Fuel Subsidies Given To Clean Energy
An anonymous reader writes A research team at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, says it has studied how much it would cost for governments to stick to their worldwide global warming goal. They've concluded that for "a 70 per cent chance of keeping below 2 degrees Celsius, the investment will have to rise to $1.2 trillion a year." Where to get that money? The researchers say that "global investment in energy is already $1 trillion a year and rising" with more than half going to fossil fuel energy. If those subsidies were spent on renewable energy instead, the researchers hypothesize that "global warming would be close to being solved."
TFA is loonie. According to its own data, the "fossil fuel subsidies" it is hoping to redirect are those that third-world OPEC type countries currently give to their own populations in the form of supercheap oil. Withholding that money would be regime suicide (plus possibly population genocide).
TFA is about one group of subsidy-seekers trying to relieve another set of subsidy seekers of ill-gotten gains, amiright?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
It would be more like what is happening in Germany. Massive investment in wind, solar, wave and geothermal, but crucially also a massive investment in a new smarter grid to support it all.
I have no doubt that it will happen in Europe, but the US is going to find it hard. Things like subsidising residential solar are seen as un-American and socialist, even though it's fine to heavily subsidise companies building fossil fuel or nuclear plants. The grid is a money-making privately owned infrastructure, not something that is supposed to work for the public's benefit. In other words, the problems are all cultural.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It never ceases to amaze me how Progressives can so blithely condemn BIG corporations and their answer to solving the "BIG Corporation" problem is always to give more power to the largest, most powerful organization on the planet. Because large size causes corruption in companies, but it must only cause nobility in governments, right?
"Money" that people have "in the bank" is really ownership of companies. What you call "withdrawing" means reallocating that money, closing one kind of business and firing its employees, and opening another kind of business and hiring people there. Whether that's a good or bad deal depends on exactly what the new business does compared to the old business.
They choose to attempt to maximize the return on their investment, which is both in their interest and in society's interest.
No, the "dilemma" you imagine doesn't exist. Rich people aren't hurt by shifting their investments from one kind of company to another kind. If Obama pours billions of subsidies into "green energy", the same people who own oil companies and profit from it will just switch over to those companies. So will your pension fund.
Really the only question is whether the new "green energy companies" will deliver what they promise; that's the part that's doubtful, because if they did, why wouldn't people be investing in them voluntarily?
I'll take a government that I can vote in or out over a corp that I can't, and often HAVE to do business with because it's a monopoly. :D
OR! Maybe it's not that black and white, and we need a decent balance. Oh, sorry, I'm off the talking points. Still, I don't think progressives are off to say that corporate power has grown tremendously in the last few decades and they need to be reigned in a bit. No one is saying to get rid of corps. Hell, I USE an LLC. The benefits are obvious. It's also obvious that our representatives don't represent us, they represent their donors. We need to reclaim our government from moneyed influence.
Government is of the people, by the people, for the people. Business's sole purpose is to serve those with money.
Government protects rights that apply to the least popular person as much as to the most popular person. Business gives the rich more rights.
No CEO swears to uphold the General Welfare. Government is mandated to by the Constitution.
... global warming'...
But I'm amazed these retards actually used the phrase 'global warming', since the new accepted LIE is to use the deliberately misleading phrase 'climate change', which is MEANT to mean "catastropic man-made global warming', and is IMPLIED every time they use it...
Just go to www.climatedepot.com and start reading the truth about this ridiculous 'global warming' scam. These 'scientists' are just shysters in it for the money, and my, doesn't it show.
ClimateDepot is a shell website created by the "Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow," a think tank funded by crackpot Richard Mellon Scaife (you might remember him from every fake Clinton scandal ever) and Exxon Mobil.
It's ran by Marc Morano, an ex-producer of Rush Limbaugh's show, which should tell you about as much as you need to know about it's journalistic ethics.
In short, ClimateDepot is a fake website designed to sucker idiots like you into believing there's some sort of "other side" to the climate change "debate" -- when in reality there isn't. But then again, 90% of the Climate Deniers I have met are in it just to piss off liberals in some sort of psychotic ignorant tribalism, so... perhaps I waste my breath.