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>If you create a large pile of government giveaway money but keep energy cheap Why would we keep energy cheap? The economics of that also needs to change. I ag

>If you create a large pile of government giveaway money but keep energy cheap Why would we keep energy cheap? The economics of that also needs to change. I agree that we should also raise carbon-intensive energy prices, and do our best to structure it to penalize disproportionate users (e.g. construction costs for massive houses and buildings). I also don't understand how you could "take the money" for improvements like insulation and then still use more energy, unless you just mean fraud in general. Change also needs to happen at a societal level. We need to tax extreme amounts of wealth, because that wealth came from society, so the burden is on them to help. On a global level, we could also do more to help developing and industrializing nations. Imagine a green version of the Marshall Plan.

sokoloff 5y ago
Right now, I only heat my house to 69°F/20.5°C in the winter (because of the cost). If a government program pays for the insulation, wall repairs, paint, and HVAC replacement to make my house more efficient, I might choose to heat my house to 74 or 75°F/24°C if energy is still cheap. That’s not fraud; that’s consumers making entirely rational trade-offs about how much each additional degree of comfort is worth to them in monetary terms. “We should tax billionaires and raise taxes on carbon energy” is effective overwhelmingly because of the second part. You could nearly equally well say “we should chew more bubble gum and raise taxes on carbon energy”. (It’s fine to have a separate debate on billionaire tax policy, but it seems tenuous at best to link it to energy policy.)