>That's exactly what regulation is and does. It picks winners, picks harmful phenomenon, and acts accordingly, with a short-to-medium timeframe based on what would get the most votes.
The subsidies are terrible. They are way too narrow and don’t address the root cause of the issue. Climate change is not happening because we don’t have enough renewables, climate change is happening because our GHG emissions are too high.
Tax the emissions and all activities which generate emissions become less appealing, while all opportunities to reduce the emissions become more lucrative. The example of riding a bike instead of buying an EV fits into this as well. With a carbon tax, using a bike would be equally accounted for.
By using subsidies, the government gets to pick the winner and doesn’t let people think. Renewables especially as they are now are a terrible way to tackle the problem. If we used taxes instead of subsidies, I’m afraid that not many renewable power plants would be built, because other alternatives are way more effective at curbing emissions.
Solutions like rooftop solar – and by extension, these Tesla tiles - wouldn’t make a lot of financial sense if people were billed for their electricity appropriately based on costs. The cost of electricity distribution is primarily a fixed cost in the infrastructure and its upkeep. The variable cost of generating the electricity is small in comparison. People, however, are generally billed more in variable cost based on use of electricity rather than with a larger, fixed fee. It’s set up in this way because it makes sense; the poor can afford connecting themselves to the grid and keep the necessities powered, while reckless use of energy i.e. having AC on 24/7 is disincentivized by the cost.
But once people start pushing rooftop solar on their grid and selling the energy back to the grid at the retail price, not the wholesale price, they are being massively subsidized in their electricity generation, as part of the fixed cost of operating the grid was baked into the variable cost of electricity prices. The pushback from utilities comes from exactly this perspective; if more and more people start net-metering their own bills lower with the rooftop solar, then it means that fewer and fewer people will be responsible for appropriately funding the grid.
In an extreme scenario where everyone net-metered their bills down to zero, it would mean that nobody would be paying for the grid. Obviously, such a situation is unsustainable. And even though there’d be plenty of solar to go by in such a situation, the grid would still be a necessity, as is all the generation which functions as a back-up. And somehow, it would all still need to be paid for.
But there’s more to it, too. Net-metering creates a reverse-incentive. Electricity prices in the wholesale market can even go negative if there is overgeneration, because overgeneration is harmful, and it needs to be dealt with. If net-metering practices are in place, and people start doing more and more rooftop solar to the point of more and more frequent overgeneration, the costs of operating the grid go up. Consequently, so would price of electricity. With a net-metering scheme still in place, everyone else is further incentivized to build solar panels on their roof and do the same to avoid paying the high prices.
If the compensation for the electricity fed back into the grid was based on wholesale price instead, then, once average price (and value) of solar-generated electricity goes down, so do the incentives to build more solar panels.
Adding insult to injury, the back-up issue is generally solved by using gas-fired power generation, as batteries cannot address the issue at this scale. Batteries are useful for bridging the gaps in between switching power generation sources, but the kind of quantity of capacity you’d need for a battery-only backup solution is not feasible.
For back-up, gas is the primary back-up solution in California as well as in Australia, and the Russians are building a pipe to supply Germany. Ironically this makes solar generation - when the whole power generation solution is inspected at the grid-level - not all that green. And while this aspect of solar is ignored by subsidies, a carbon tax would still take it into account.
The point being, subsidies can not only be ineffective, they can also be counterproductive in addition to ignoring all the alternatives.
> I, too, believe that taxing actual atmospheric carbon impact would be great, but how would you measure such a thing fairly?
You can measure emissions at sources and impose heavy fines on anyone who tries to circumvent them. The common problem in globalization, though, is defining and applying these standards universally and fairly. If you can’t trust the Germans to not fumble their numbers, what you’d think would happen in some other countries? Still, with a coordinated effort and systems to ensure transparency, it would be possible.
Another method would be to subsidize more effective alternatives or for the government to build the more effective solutions by themselves. While this wouldn’t have the direction-changing impact of the carbon tax, it would be more straightforward to implement without the requirement of tracking pollution. Targets of subsidies could be selected by their impact on emissions per $ invested. Of course, the numbers could be fumbled here as well, but at least the calculations could be made public and be subject to scrutiny.