>I don't think the government should be subsidizing any energy sources or playing favorites with certain sources over others. That applies just as much to playing favorites in favor of "alternative" energy sources as to playing favorites in favor of oil, coal, and natural gas. (Actually the government subsidizes all of these.)
This is not possible. You might be misunderstanding how subsidies work. Everything the government does is a subsidy of something or other. Building out roads nice new roads in every podunk town in America is an enormous subsidy to oil. Allowing people to pollute my air with carbon is an enormous subsidy to oil. Again, it is literally impossible to be agnostic.
>No, let's not. Let's ask, instead, why you apparently believe that the only way to fix anything that is "unsustainable" is government policy.
Where on earth do you get the idea that I think this?
>Why not just let the market work?
Externalities. Unless you start making all carbon users bear all costs associated with their carbon use, I have to bear that cost for them. The market can't sort that out unless I can forcibly stop other people's carbon use myself. In that case, we would have a violent solution, not a market solution. Governments is justifiable largely on the grounds that it replaces the need for these violent solutions.
>If governments would stop subsiziding fossil fuels, their prices would be higher, and there would be more market pressure to find alternatives.
Agree.
>Just as we found alternatives to horses that saved us from the "unsustainable" practice in the late 19th century of using horses for transportation, which, if that had gone on the same way, would have us all by now, as the saying goes, knee deep in horsesxxt.
This move had nothing to do with global sustainability. It had to do with scalability, user friendliness, etc.
>No, it's not, it's a fact of life. Most of the things we currently do are not "supported by science".
Agreed. So the question is why do you think some policies (like burning carbon) are justifiable without science. While others (like not burning carbon) need more science? You haven't justified this asymmetry.
>We do not have well-supported scientific rationales for most of our current activities.
Exactly. So why do you think we need well-supported scientific rationales for new activities?
>That's because we don't have a good scientific understanding of the relevant domains for most of our current activities.
Absolutely agree. You're talking common sense here.
>But just stopping all of our current activities that aren't "supported by science" is not a viable alternative,
And no one is arguing we should. But pretending that we can continue burning carbon at current rates (without any scientific support for this) is not in any way more justifiable than saying "we need to start burning less carbon".
>So it's you that is being illogical, not me.
Nope. It's you. We can't keep burning carbon the way we are and there's no reason to think we can. There are better reasons to think we can't.