So were just supposed to celebrate milquetoast bullshit? Capitalism isn’t going to fix shit
How about you reward any action in the right direction because it ain’t fucking happening normally no matter how many grand ideas you hold.
If you’re going to wait to fix climate change, until after you’ve replaced capitalism first. You might as well work on taraforming Mars and sending billions of people on rockets instead.
please ignore sudden tarrifs on EVs, batteries and solar panels as we hope capitalism solves the crisis. We can throw them money and they’ll do it like when we did that to have isps expand internet access and infrastructure
Hundreds of billions towards highways is certainly an action on climate
Not every action has been in the right direction, but on balance, the bulk have been.
The bulk has been money to highways. Nothing else comes close
Yes, a lot of money is spent on things like repairing highways. “Just don’t maintain the bridge” isn’t a good move.
Its poison for any effort to curb climate change. The concrete production alone is a major source of greenhouse gases, and its being done to further prioritize the single largest source of emissions in the US, personal vehicles. I cant think of a more effective thing to spend money on if the goal is to accelerate climate change.
Which is why the federal government is trying to buy concrete made in different ways that don’t cause those emissions.
It’s not at full scale yet, and won’t be for some years. but it’s how you actually solve that kind of problem without making peoples’ lives worse.
Decarbonization is a worldwide multi-decade project. It’s not something that any one politician or country can do on its own.
This is an argument I’ve been pitching in the Australian context for some 20 years now - we should have been world leaders in solar technology, to the extent that by now we should have massive solar farms across the North of Australia in order to export clean, green energy up to Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and other near-neighbours. We could have created a whole new industry of both research and advanced manufacturing, and if we’d nationally sequester our resources correctly we could be doing every step of the way - dig out the minerals, refine them, manufacture them into panels, export those panels - all the while generating very low cost energy and exporting it for profit as well! Not to mention so many new jobs!
Even once you take away all of the obvious arguments for climate change action (environmental, ethical, prevention of future disasters etc.) there was always going to be a strong financial incentive in a capitalistic market to move to technology that has the lowest input cost to generate energy, which just so happens to be renewables. It just baffles me that so many politicians crucified themselves on the altar of coal when they could’ve been remembered for ushering in simultaneous economic benefit and environmental benefit, with a long term impact of lowered inflation through cheaper power bills, but that’s what the minerals lobby in this country has managed to achieve. What a disgrace.
Good to see a world leader using the economic arguments in addition to the other more obvious ones.
