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> will just become profits for the companies ... greed Of course they will. You can thank this effect for the high standard of living we enjoy from the free market.
Is there a free market though? Seems like it's all taxed and regulated.
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You know, collectively, we can do something about that… It’s a political decision in society to allow that added value to be sucked up by those who are already wealthy.
You can buy stock in those companies and get your share of the profits.
On the other hand, the companies will be made of people, expand by hiring new people, and pay these people with those profits, so much of the money will make it to people.
Companies making lots of money is not a problem. Companies saving vast amounts of it in war chests is, IMO (depending on how they save it), as it's effectively removing it from the economy. I really hope Apple and Google's massive saving are stored by being reinvested in some way and aren't just entirely removed from the economy, because that would be a shame. I suppose even if they were just stored in a bank that would be used as capital for loans, so maybe it's not that bad.
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> will just become profits for the companies ... greed Of course they will. You can thank this effect for the high standard of living we enjoy from the free market.
Is there a free market though? Seems like it's all taxed and regulated.
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If anyone is curious about the full list of funders: > This work was supported by funding from Partners for a New Economy (R.W. and J.D.F.); Baillie Gifford (J.D.F.); the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 730427 (COP21 RIPPLES) (R.W.); and the Oxford Martin School , through the Institute of New Economic Thinking and the Post-Carbon Transition programme ( LDR0053…
He founded the lead author’s employer. Am I misreading that?
Obviously that effect is going to be significant, but what exactly does it look like?
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Please have a look here: https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ The evidence is clear and uncontroversial (and has been for decades).
It's a standard tactic of skeptics. Ask a simple question. Takes only a minute or two. But the answer turns out to not be so simple, and requires much time in composing an answer. And of course the answer also invokes concepts, terms, models, research, etc that themselves are not simple, and so the questioner asks another round of "simple questions", which take significant time to answer. After a few rounds of this the answerers are exhausted and the questioner proclaims victory in the sense that he/she still has questions, and the answerers "can't" answer them, typically because they have jobs, kids, significant others, and in general a life outside answering skeptic questions.
There is a tremendous amount of literature on this in both the popular press and scientific journals. You can google those as easily as we can, and if you were serious about finding the honest answers to your questions that's where you would start.
Garbage comment from an uninformed SW engineer: How, in the current economic and geopolitical environment, can they project that production costs will continue to decline? Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. It also has been benefiting from globalization which is now going in reverse. I would add at least 5 years to any timeline given because of the recalibrating global energy and material…
> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. This may be true for certain products, but it's not broadly true. There's nothing intrinsic that requires solar panels, lithium ion batteries, or wind turbines to be manufactured using dirty energy.
The problem is right now these things do indeed depend on dirty energy. You're basically making the same fallacious argument as politicians do now. In the long run, everything will be green. That's not the point. The point is how we get there. You can't ignore the present or the engineering involved to get to the future.
One thing I've not seen a decent discussion of is what industries benefit from enormous amounts of almost free electricity? Other than the manufacturers of wind, solar, etc systems, how does this effect the economy? Obviously that effect is going to be significant, but what exactly does it look like?
Garbage comment from an uninformed SW engineer: How, in the current economic and geopolitical environment, can they project that production costs will continue to decline? Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. It also has been benefiting from globalization which is now going in reverse. I would add at least 5 years to any timeline given because of the recalibrating global energy and material…
The quick answer is that we are not short of any of those materials. We might not be producing enough right now, but there's far more than enough that can be mined or recycled inexpensively. Increased prices will cause more mining and recycling, eventually the price will settle at the cost of production + something for profit. The something for profit is quite small, the coast for low risk capital is ~5% a year. Ther…
For the most part you are correct. But building the mines, refining, supply chains, etc takes time. So you are perhaps missing one of the main points I was trying, maybe unsuccessfully, to make: we need to deal with the 'right now' and not just worry about how we'll be fine in 50 years.
Lithium is a perfect example. We have plenty in the ground. We don't have plenty of mines. We should be allocating Li carefully until those issues are resolved in 5-10 years.
If we only base our energy policy on how things will be in a decade we will delay the transition while inflicting maximum pain on the population(energy and food shortages, rampant inflation, lower standard of living, etc).
One thing I've not seen a decent discussion of is what industries benefit from enormous amounts of almost free electricity? Other than the manufacturers of wind, solar, etc systems, how does this effect the economy? Obviously that effect is going to be significant, but what exactly does it look like?
Aluminium production, desalination, and more