You don't need to tell them that. Rich countries could subsidize clean energy projects in poor countries. That's only fair given that most carbon emissions per capita have come from rich countries. Like a retroactive carbon tax.
Talking beyond your snark to anyone else reading this -- obviously I mean solar, wind, nuclear or hydro installations either in the poor country, or in the rich country and piped into the poor country via HVDC at discount rates.
Anything less is quite morally unfair if you think about it. Rich countries have imposed this massive externality on poor countries and they haven't compensated the poor countries for doing so. If you make money by dumping waste into my backyard, the least you can do is give me a small slice of the profits.
Subsidizing clean energy in poor countries is a way to satisfy this moral obligation while also solving the problem you raised.
You mean wind, solar, nuclear, batteries and electrolysers? Because we have them available right now. In fact, we had them for the last couple of decades.
we have them yes, and at this moment, the richest country in Europe is rationing hot water and restarting coal power plants due a temporary disruption of supply of another fossil fuel.
Europe + North America is 10% of the world population, and we can barely carry our own burden.
I don't see your argument. Everybody knows that we're not deploying carbon free technology sufficiently quickly. That's why we're reading these articles.
in your reality, we're a type 1 civilization with unlimited resources, so obscenely rich that providing the rest of the world with free clean energy is a matter of political will
in my reality, we're 95% dependent on fossil fuels, dams and nuclear power stations cost tens of billions and take decades to build, there are no viable energy storage technologies, and even the few somewhat viable renewable energy technologies we possess still rely on a limited supply of expensive things like lithium. also, in my reality, double digit percentage of our population lives in poverty, and about half lives paycheck to paycheck, and our richest country is 30T in debt
We spend literal trillions on waging war. Every rocket fired in Ukraine today would pay for solar panels for a house or two. It's not a matter of money. Look how well we managed to to switch literally all industry to building weapons during the last world war. If we wanted to we could do the same for renewable energy. It's a matter of priorities.
But in actuality, it's much easier to do than that, because renewable energy is not all that expensive or hard to build. In many scenarios it's profitable to build it today, but bureaucracy is in the way. The proper market incentives and a bit of legislation would probably be enough to have private industry take over.
> Every rocket fired in Ukraine today would pay for solar panels for a house or two.
But it's more important that we stop Putin from just taking whatever territory he wants and killing as many civilians as it takes to do that than it is to put solar panels on a few more houses.
If you don't spend any money on your military except when you need it, it will take so long to get it back up to speed that you'll probably lose the war in the meantime.
And if you don't spend any money on renewable energy life for a large fraction of our species will become much harder.
And it's not like military spending is really necessary either. The US for example spent a lot of money in Afghanistan and Iraq even though the country wasn't under reasonable threat from those actors.
You interpret little action and a lack of political will as evidence for "too hard and too expensive", when it's mostly ideological possession and corruption by anti-renewable conservatives, and to a smaller extent anti-nuclear greens.
Solar and wind costs are roughly on par with fossil fuels now. Variability doesn't matter when you can pipe excess amounts into poorer countries. It's all excuses.
"double digit percentage of our population lives in poverty"
So you're taking the moral high ground huh. Will you be happy to accept a hundred million immigrants from SEA when the pollution from your country has made their region too hot to be liveable? Or will there be a convenient excuse to not do that?
