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Originally Posted by SeeGeeWhy
Other green tech is not the panacea media portrays it to be. It also has poor net energy contributions on a system level and have not led to meaningful reductions in emission intensity or other important impact measures such as land use or human mortality. Those problems scale exponentially as the penetration of these technologies increase.
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Hence the need for constant improvements to current green technologies and development of new ones. This requires substantial funding from the public and private sectors. Private investment hasn't been sufficient to this point which means public funding has to pick up the slack.
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Do not take the spectre of reducing net energy lightly. It is not “giving up a few excesses and luxuries”. For you, perhaps. For most of the planet, absolutely the difference between life and death. Allowing the bottom to fall out for ideological reasons is a sure fire recipe for human civilization to cannibalize itself completely, and in my mind is equivalent to advocating for the immediate death of billions of people and this is no exaggeration.
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It's not clear what you're referring to here. What do you mean by "letting the bottom fall out" leading to billions of deaths? It sounds an awful lot like the argument that I hear often from climate change deniers, which goes something like you can't significantly cut global C02 emissions without starving billions of people to death. It's a silly argument because it's not at all true. The only thing I'm calling for here is carbon pricing in all relatively wealthy nations, with the money being devoted to green technology R&D. The benefit is two-fold, it leads to a reduction in consumption in the first world, which means less importing cheap goods from communist China. At the same time, we accelerate the pace of green technology advancement.
Canada has carbon pricing, and that's great. But every G20 country should have it, IMO. I don't see how this would equate to "starving out billions of people".