It blows my mind that the very same people who can't seem to talk about anything but growing the economy don't see the incredible opportunity to grow the economy that building tons of new green tech represents. Like, completely replacing the world's energy infrastructure is more jobs (and money) than all the defense projects and military tech we could ever think up, combined.
It's almost like it was never about the economy, but just about keeping the existing set of corporations raking in the profits and protecting them from disruption.
Yes, historically, all major economic booms coincide with some dramatic evolution in the use of energy. If you stop thinking about renewables as some hippy pipe dream and start thinking about them as a roughly two orders of magnitude drop in cost for energy, it's immediately obvious that this is going to kick off another such boom and that it will happen a lot faster than some people expect precisely because of that drop in price.
Initially, not a lot of people believed this and it was kind of expensive to e.g. put solar on your roof and even make the argument that it was at all economical to do so. That changed a few years ago and people around the world are doing the math and coming to the conclusion that these systems pay for themselves in well under half their supposed life time. Ever since that became obvious, there is a lot of demand for solar panels. Companies building more or better panels are popping up everywhere. There's a lot of innovation happening. And the net result is better, cheaper, technology produced at a rapidly expanding scale. We have already hit the point that even the subsidies and incentives that are available for this are not technically needed any more.
IMHO, learning effects, and ongoing research will cause cost to drop much further still. We have nowhere near reached the point of what is technically feasible here at all. What happens when you drop the cost of energy by about 100x in a few decades or so? An economic boom is what happens. Things that used to be prohibitively expensive now become cheap to do. And people start doing these things as quickly as they can.
You might think 100x is an exaggeration. But actually, we've already experienced that with solar in the past 20 years. Price parity was reached more than 5 years ago. I'm actually talking about another 100x improvement So four orders of magnitude in total. About 2 orders relative to fossil fuel powered energy, which is a fair benchmark because that's what we are trying to get rid off. At some point renewables are going to be so obviously cheaper that they start pushing out anything more expensive out of the market. The cheaper things get, the faster that happens. The more it happens, the faster learning effects, R&D, etc. will happen. That massive acceleration is basically what is causing people to move targets.
This gives me hope. It also makes me increasingly annoyed at the political forces that have stood in the way for the past few decades. It would merely be an annoying roadblock in a technological fantasy if it weren't the case that fossil fuels are totally fucking up the planet, and they fucking know that.
My comment isn't related specifically to going green, but replacing infrastructure that works perfectly well just for jobs is basically the broken window fallacy in economics.
Repaving the highway every six months would "create" lots of jobs too.
Yes, except the broken window fallacy doesn't quite work here for a few reasons:
First, the current technology is already breaking. It needs to be updated and maintained. So why not invest the same money in the newer tech.
Two, the current technology is way better. We will be able to get more bang for our buck with the newer technologies AND they have the benefit of not poisoning our sky.
It's almost like it was never about the economy, but just about keeping the existing set of corporations raking in the profits and protecting them from disruption.