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Interesting. There's perhaps still the open question of exactly who should pay the owners of fossil fuel assets. A few academics over here (in Australia) recen
by shoo 11y ago
Interesting. There's perhaps still the open question of exactly who should pay the owners of fossil fuel assets.
A few academics over here (in Australia) recently proposed that the most polluting energy generators be forced to exit the market, and that they would be paid compensation by their competitors, as their competitors stood to profit from the reduction in competition.
That was a pretty interesting argument. In the long run, I believe the public still ends up paying for everything (due to increased energy prices), but perhaps it would be a more politically acceptable way to wind down some of the more polluting companies.
Personally I think this kind of approach is far more complicated, and far less efficient than an appropriately priced carbon tax, but we don't have one of those.
- danieltillett 11y agoThe people who should pay are the people who are going to benefit - future generations including the people who are not even born yet. Luckily we have a magic mechanism for doing this - the long term zero coupon bond [1]. We just issue zero coupon bonds and use the money to buy up fossil fuel assets and build replacements. The cost gets shifted onto the people in the future who will benefit from not living in a world 5˚C hotter. I actually gave a talk about this years ago - I will try and find my slides and put them up somewhere Edit. I posted the slides to my blog [2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-coupon_bond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-coupon_bond 2. http://www.tillett.info/2015/12/13/preventing-global-climate-collapse/ http://www.tillett.info/2015/12/13/preventing-global-climate...