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You don't need private investment to do electrification and renewable energy. That can be done by the government. Which doesn't have funding problems, ever.

• crazygringo 3y ago
  The government isn't inventing electric cars or improving heat pumps or improving batteries or making solar panels more efficient to produce. You absolutely still need private investment in a growing economy to produce and invent these technologies. What the government incentives then can do is speed up their rates of adoption and installation. But you need both sides -- public and private.
  • amrocha 3y ago
    The government is literally doing that by funding research. The government can fund literally anything it wants to. Private investment is literally never necessary.
    • crazygringo 3y ago
      What you're describing is a command economy of the type the Soviet Union had -- no private investment. The whole history the twentieth century is the evidence that such a system doesn't work. And it especially doesn't work as technology has become increasingly complex. Markets are vastly better-informed investors than governments can ever be. Which is why it's generally vastly better for governments to skew incentives for private investment to favor a particular area, rather than make investments directly.
      • amrocha 3y ago
        No, that's not what I'm describing. Stop putting your ideological spin on my words. The government doesn't need the private sector, it allows the private sector to exist where it's deemed beneficial.
      • mempko 3y ago
        The rise of the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) to become the largest sector in the US economy (22+%) coincides with an increase in proportion of private R&D expenditure compared to government expenditure. In 2010 businesses spend $248 billion on R&D while the government spent $126 billion. In 2021 that number was $587 billion compared to $153 billion. In other words, the share of Business R&D went from 66% of R&D spend to about 80%. The reason this is not a good trend is that the KIND of R&D businesses do vs government are very different. Government invests in basic research and invention while business invests in innovation. Less money is going into science and more into squeezing money out of people via innovation. I would argue this is because the sector that makes all the important decisions is now the FIRE sector, which only thinks about the next quarter. source: https://ncses.nsf.gov/data-collections/national-patterns/2021 https://ncses.nsf.gov/data-collections/national-patterns/202...
• thriftwy 3y ago
  Late USSR had funding problems. Crashed due to having them. So governments have funding problems too. You may also ask Argentine.
• Axsuul 3y ago
  Where do you think the government gets its funding from? And no, you can't just print your way out of this.