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> I suspect that the elephant in the room is simply money. Who pays? This one is very frustrating. The core of the issue is the lack of long-term strategy. It

> I suspect that the elephant in the room is simply money. Who pays? This one is very frustrating. The core of the issue is the lack of long-term strategy. It has been obvious for decades that paying now is orders of magnitude cheaper than bearing the consequences of things like climate change and a dependence on a madman dictator hell bent on revenge with delusions of grandeur. But the practical solutions are screws that we can’t really use with our free-market hammers.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
We had good free-market solutions that we didn't use either, so I'm not totally sure that free-market thinking is the root cause, unless you're referring to people using 'free-market' as an excuse to do things that help the rich and the powerful, while ignoring 'free-market' things that would help other groups, which is often the case. Probably best to seperate people knowlingly lying about science/politics/economics to suit themselves from the activities themselves, though that can be complicated at times.
- kergonath 4y ago
  > We had good free-market solutions that we didn't use either, so I'm not totally sure that free-market thinking is the root cause, unless you're referring to people using 'free-market' as an excuse to do things that help the rich and the powerful, while ignoring 'free-market' things that would help other groups, which is often the case. That’s right, we could have done more even within a somewhat free-market framework. Though a lot of people would argue that the moment the government has to step in with incentives and taxes it ceases to be free; this was an argument that was used against cap and trade, for example (though even cap and trade is a terrible solution anyway). These solutions would not really help with large infrastructure projects or the lack of will to address dependence to Russian gas, for example.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Cap and trade is a fine solution. It's basically equivalent to carbon pricing. You can mess up carbon taxes by setting the wrong price, not increasing it predictably over time or exempting certain sectors, mismeasuring or whatever. That's basically the same things you can mess up with Cap and Trade. Cross border effects have impacts too, but there's no fundamental reason why carbon pricing or cap and trade wouldn't be a good solution to weaning Germany off Russian gas.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

We had good free-market solutions that we didn't use either, so I'm not totally sure that free-market thinking is the root cause, unless you're referring to people using 'free-market' as an excuse to do things that help the rich and the powerful, while ignoring 'free-market' things that would help other groups, which is often the case. Probably best to seperate people knowlingly lying about science/politics/economics to suit themselves from the activities themselves, though that can be complicated at times.

kergonath 4y ago
> We had good free-market solutions that we didn't use either, so I'm not totally sure that free-market thinking is the root cause, unless you're referring to people using 'free-market' as an excuse to do things that help the rich and the powerful, while ignoring 'free-market' things that would help other groups, which is often the case. That’s right, we could have done more even within a somewhat free-market framework. Though a lot of people would argue that the moment the government has to step in with incentives and taxes it ceases to be free; this was an argument that was used against cap and trade, for example (though even cap and trade is a terrible solution anyway). These solutions would not really help with large infrastructure projects or the lack of will to address dependence to Russian gas, for example.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Cap and trade is a fine solution. It's basically equivalent to carbon pricing. You can mess up carbon taxes by setting the wrong price, not increasing it predictably over time or exempting certain sectors, mismeasuring or whatever. That's basically the same things you can mess up with Cap and Trade. Cross border effects have impacts too, but there's no fundamental reason why carbon pricing or cap and trade wouldn't be a good solution to weaning Germany off Russian gas.