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> "Even if you're a climate denier, you should be on board with what we're advocating," Prof Doyne Farmer from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Ox
by credit_guy 4y ago
> "Even if you're a climate denier, you should be on board with what we're advocating," Prof Doyne Farmer from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School told BBC News.
> "Our central conclusion is that we should go full speed ahead with the green energy transition because it's going to save us money," he said.
Both conclusions are wrong: 1. if you are a client denier and you are not on board with what they are advocating, nobody cares. 2. we don't need to say "we should go full speed with green technologies". If they are more profitable, we'll just go full speed, regardless of whether we push for this or not.
And by the way, we are already going full speed. In 2021 we (the world) have invested 3 times more money in renewable power generation that in fossil fuel power generation [1].
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2021/executive-summary https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2021/exe...
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoWhy is 3x more "full speed" and not 30x or 300x? If it's just a philosophical objection to government intervention in markets then removing government support for fossil fuels and pollution would be consistent with that.
- credit_guy 4y agoIf you ask random people on the streets if they think power companies invest more in fossil fuels or in renewables, it's quite likely they'll say yes. By this token, I find the fact that not only they invest more, but they invest 3 times as much really encouraging. You ask why not 30x or 300x. I don't know, maybe I'm more of a glass-half-full type of person. But that's just me. You are absolutely free to think that we are doing quite bad while we are not at 30x or 300x.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoI don't think we're doing nothing, but I also think we could do more, hence why 'full speed' seemed an odd choice of phrase to me. There's a difference between thinking the glass is half full, and that the glass is half the size and so there's no more room for any water anyway so we couldn't have any more water no matter what we did.