The Green New Deal

theprestige said:
What disinformation? The US government spent *$528 million of taxpayer money on a non competitive renewable energy company.
Click to expand...

So what?

The US Debt under 770 days of the Trump administration has increased by $2 trillion. That's $108 million per hour - your paltry $528 million is worth 4hr 53min of climbing US national debt!
 
Ziggurat said:
Who is "we"? If "we" is taxpayers rather than energy producers and consumers, then perhaps we shouldn't.
Click to expand...


coal is no longer competitive with renewables, even after receiving massive indirect subsidies by not having to pay for the long term economic damage of the climate change it causes.

nuclear is no longer competitive with renewables without massive public subsidies in the form of R&D, underwriting, borrowing costs, and directly building reactors.

Non-coal fossil energy such petroleum and natural gas are marginally more competitive than renewables, but only if you if you don't fact in the long term economic damage from climate change.

You don't seem to spend a lot of complaining about these costs being passed on to the taxpayer which tells us you don't care about taxpayer burden in the slightest, and that you are simply reciting dogma.
 
Jerrymander said:
You tried to use this to argue that we shouldn't invest in renewable energy.
Click to expand...
No. My argument is that not all investment is good investment, that good intentions don't justify bad decisions, and that asking for a lot to get a little sometimes just means you get a little bit of a bad thing.

Cost-effective renewable energy in sufficient quantities is a gain, but it doesn't follow that therefore every proposal to invest in renewable energy is a good thing. You said "renewable energy is a gain". I gave you a concrete, well-documented example of investment in renewable energy that was a complete loss.

And "renewable energy is a gain" doesn't even really support the claim that asking for a lot to get a little is always a good idea - nor even that it's a good idea in this case.
 
theprestige said:
No. My argument is that not all investment is good investment, that good intentions don't justify bad decisions, and that asking for a lot to get a little sometimes just means you get a little bit of a bad thing.

Cost-effective renewable energy in sufficient quantities is a gain, but it doesn't follow that therefore every proposal to invest in renewable energy is a good thing. You said "renewable energy is a gain". I gave you a concrete, well-documented example of investment in renewable energy that was a complete loss.

And "renewable energy is a gain" doesn't even really support the claim that asking for a lot to get a little is always a good idea - nor even that it's a good idea in this case.
Click to expand...

I sort of hate this post, but I wouldn't say it is necessarily your fault prestige. It seems more a problem with language and the challenges of describing all this. All renewables are not the same and really shouldn't be spoke of monolithically. And the same is true about how we invest in them. There are differences between investing in R&D, direct corporate subsidies and market or puchasing subsidies.

I'm a big believer in a lot more R&D into different energy technologies and purchasing subsidies, but have reservations of direct corporate subsidies. I also believe in more money spent on material sciences which I think may solve a lot of problems in many fields. I would rob defense spending and NASA in a minute for either.
 
acbytesla said:
I sort of hate this post, but I wouldn't say it is necessarily your fault prestige. It seems more a problem with language and the challenges of describing all this. All renewables are not the same and really shouldn't be spoke of monolithically. And the same is true about how we invest in them. There are differences between investing in R&D, direct corporate subsidies and market or puchasing subsidies.

I'm a big believer in a lot more R&D into different energy technologies and purchasing subsidies, but have reservations of direct corporate subsidies. I also believe in more money spent on material sciences which I think may solve a lot of problems in many fields. I would rob defense spending and NASA in a minute for either.
Click to expand...

Yup. I'm happy for this opportunity to agree with you, even if only a little bit.

I'm a fan of the NASA model: Set a challenge to advance the state of the art in aerospace engineering, and then solicit bids from private industry to meet the challenge. The competitive bids get the contract. This is good for the bidder, since NASA is essentially assuming the R&D risk by funding the project. And it's good for NASA, because if the project succeeds new science gets done and the state of the art gets advanced. All of that adds up to being good for society as a whole.

Solyndra seems to have been more of a "we should fund renewable energy; this is renewable energy; we should fund this!" type situation.

I'm in favor of funding renewable energy R&D. I'm in favor of subsidizing some amount of renewable energy industry. But none of that actually defends the idea that it's always good to ask for a lot in order to get a little.
 
lomiller said:
coal is no longer competitive with renewables, even after receiving massive indirect subsidies by not having to pay for the long term economic damage of the climate change it causes.

nuclear is no longer competitive with renewables without massive public subsidies in the form of R&D, underwriting, borrowing costs, and directly building reactors.

Non-coal fossil energy such petroleum and natural gas are marginally more competitive than renewables, but only if you if you don't fact in the long term economic damage from climate change.

You don't seem to spend a lot of complaining about these costs being passed on to the taxpayer which tells us you don't care about taxpayer burden in the slightest, and that you are simply reciting dogma.
Click to expand...

This. Factoring in the externalized costs only of renewables while ignoring the externalized costs of the other methods is just not a valid comparison.

theprestige said:
Yup. I'm happy for this opportunity to agree with you, even if only a little bit.

I'm a fan of the NASA model: Set a challenge to advance the state of the art in aerospace engineering, and then solicit bids from private industry to meet the challenge. The competitive bids get the contract. This is good for the bidder, since NASA is essentially assuming the R&D risk by funding the project. And it's good for NASA, because if the project succeeds new science gets done and the state of the art gets advanced. All of that adds up to being good for society as a whole.

Solyndra seems to have been more of a "we should fund renewable energy; this is renewable energy; we should fund this!" type situation.

I'm in favor of funding renewable energy R&D. I'm in favor of subsidizing some amount of renewable energy industry. But none of that actually defends the idea that it's always good to ask for a lot in order to get a little.
Click to expand...

I actually strongly agree with you on this. That model is useful, and I'd say even necessary. Leveraging the strengths of the capitalist systems in place with such public/private partnerships can work absolute wonders when well implemented and stopped from just becoming corporate handouts.

Necessary but not sufficient in this case. Energy generation also need the right, and strong, kinds of regulations to keep companies from externalizing costs/damage and stifling competition with regulatory capture.
 
tyr_13 said:
This. Factoring in the externalized costs only of renewables while ignoring the externalized costs of the other methods is just not a valid comparison.



I actually strongly agree with you on this. That model is useful, and I'd say even necessary. Leveraging the strengths of the capitalist systems in place with such public/private partnerships can work absolute wonders when well implemented and stopped from just becoming corporate handouts.

Necessary but not sufficient in this case. Energy generation also need the right, and strong, kinds of regulations to keep companies from externalizing costs/damage and stifling competition with regulatory capture.
Click to expand...

I agree with all of this.
 
theprestige said:
I'm in favor of funding renewable energy R&D. I'm in favor of subsidizing some amount of renewable energy industry. But none of that actually defends the idea that it's always good to ask for a lot in order to get a little.
Click to expand...

I'm not necessarily trying to. I just believe that R&D in "energy" technologies is imperative. Note that I didn't say "renewable" because I don't know what that encompasses.
 
Here's a great article from a climate change activist on why renewables (alone) aren't the answer:

Thanks to its energy density, nuclear plants require far less land than renewables. Even in sunny California, a solar farm requires 450 times more land to produce the same amount of energy as a nuclear plant.
Click to expand...

We constantly hear, where are you going to put the nuclear waste; how come we never hear about where we are going to put the solar power waste products:

All of the waste fuel from 45 years of the Swiss nuclear program can fit, in canisters, on a basketball court-like warehouse, where like all spent nuclear fuel, it has never hurt a fly.

By contrast, solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste.

We tend to think of solar panels as clean, but the truth is that there is no plan anywhere to deal with solar panels at the end of their 20 to 25 year lifespan.

Experts fear solar panels will be shipped, along with other forms of electronic waste, to be disassembled—or, more often, smashed with hammers—by poor communities in Africa and Asia, whose residents will be exposed to the dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium.
Click to expand...
 
acbytesla said:
I'm not necessarily trying to. I just believe that R&D in "energy" technologies is imperative. Note that I didn't say "renewable" because I don't know what that encompasses.
Click to expand...

Fair enough. Please note that you stepped into a discussion between me and Jerrymander, about whether the GND is a good example of asking a lot to get a little. I said it wasn't necessarily a good example, and he replied by saying renewables are good so therefore my argument was invalid. We've kind of been stuck there ever since.

Anyway, let me know when AOC or anyone else comes up with a "green new deal" that includes actual concrete, negotiable policy proposals.
 
All of the waste fuel from 45 years of the Swiss nuclear program can fit, in canisters, on a basketball court-like warehouse, where like all spent nuclear fuel, it has never hurt a fly.
Click to expand...

All you need to do is keep it continually submerged in moving water for the next few thousand years with any failure in this pumping system over that time possibly requiring the evacuation of most of the country.

Furthermore, you’d fill ~30 such basketball courts every century if you wanted to replace all Switzerland’s energy production with Nuclear power. Down the road you could easily be looking at hundreds or thousands of cooling ponds, and any one of them failing even once in 1000 years could effectively end Switzerland’s existence as a country.

Again, current nuclear technology simply does not scale sufficiently well to be more than a relatively small part of the solution and carries with it extreme long term liabilities that are not adequately accounted for in it’s already high price/KWh.
 
Last edited:
theprestige said:
Fair enough. Please note that you stepped into a discussion between me and Jerrymander, about whether the GND is a good example of asking a lot to get a little. I said it wasn't necessarily a good example, and he replied by saying renewables are good so therefore my argument was invalid. We've kind of been stuck there ever since.

Anyway, let me know when AOC or anyone else comes up with a "green new deal" that includes actual concrete, negotiable policy proposals.
Click to expand...

Goals for energy efficiency would certainly end up working that way. If you don’t at least look at everything you are bound to leave something on the table.

My chief objection remains the notion that you can leverage the Fed to meet these goals. That isn’t what the Fed is there for, and it absolutely needs to be left out of any politics. It’s bad enough that Republicans are trying to monkey with the Fed for political reasons, having both parties do it would ultimately be a disaster.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom