This argument has received responses calling me a Commie, a Tankie, and 'a would-be enslaver of humanity' from family, friends, and internet randoms alike.
For me it is that I just... sorta listened to Bill Nye in the 90s about carbon dioxide.
If "our" means on the US, you may have to take a look at your electricity monopolies for it to make any difference.
No they wouldn't. Final consumer cost is based on what people WILL pay not what they WANT to pay. At the end of the day the overarching goal of capitalism is for 99% of the population to spend 100% of their earnings. You can't funnel all wealth to the 1% if the 99% are holding on to it.
So you’re telling me if I found a way reach all my fellow power company customers we could strike and lower our power rates?
This is sounding like you're trying to do a socialism over here.
Sounds like you don't understand what socialism is
Many states have very regulated utility prices: you may need just a half dozen buddies and get appointed to the oversight board that approves rates
This guy politics.
The main problem with that is the large power consumption by industry. This is ensuring continued profits for the company and thereby weakens your influence, similar to hiring scabs.
Yes. It's like big telecom. When people install panels at home, power companies start inventing additional fees. If communities start looking for local grids, companies start lobbying to outlaw this.
Yes. BUT there are certain ways a government can help its citizens (and itself in most cases) by allowing them to be self sufficient that has nothing to do with electric companies or monopolies at all. The subsidies for solar panels were a great example of this. Depending on your personal needs, you could generate enough power to take yourself off the grid, and the government invested in your panels by way of those subsidies. In many cases the extra electricity from the panels that you don't use can go back into a grid to be used by someone else. Theoretically helping you and the government. There are, of course some issues with the system but speaking from experience it can absolutely work and work wonderfully.
Unfortunately Trump (of course) has killed these subsidies so that will not be a thing as of new years 2026.
Imagine the savings to society with the energy independence from green energy
I know your intentions are good, but this reads as a rather damning list of why a bunch of people are going to fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.
Would companies make it cheaper or would they keep the price and pocket the profit?
They can't, if you have a functioning market economy. There should be competition and renewables, due to their more decentralized nature even incite competition.
You seem to assume that mergers and acquisitions are not an essential part of a market economy. Left to their own devices, capitalists will always end up trying to form monopolies. You need a strong regulatory state to keep them in check. But then because they are inexorably pulled towards maximizing profitability, they will try to capture the state and deregulate. So, unless you go to a very aggressively anticapitalist set of policies a market economy will never be "functioning" for long.
Bold of you to assume the government cares about you at all.
Reminder that China's competent government has done exactly this, and as a result they produce 93% of the world's solar photovoltaic panels.
Can we get the competency with out the whole... Everything else?
Or is our choice between awful and ineffective or awful and effective?
And then he was yeeted out of the window
Thankfully that is going to happen anyway through simple economics. Fossil fuel extraction is functionally already a peak technology, out of which every bit of efficiency has been squeezed by over 100 years of frantic and lavishly funded scientific development, whereas solar, battery, and wind technologies have been absolutely plunging in $-per-Kw to deploy and have much much further to go. So governments can try to slow this down as much as they wish, but it's as much a fool's errand as trying to rescue the horse industry in about 1920.
Now as for the question of "why isn't this more efficient technology resulting in savings for, me, the consumer?" I can only encourage you to look at the entire history of extractive, investor-driven capitalism for the answer.
This is an absolute fact: the government refuses to invest in green energy because it produces too much energy and they’d have to give out power for free.
Maybe it would also be much cheaper if "your" houses were a bit smaller and had proper insulation...
I wish!! Unfortunately, I didn't build my house.
Have you considered inventing a time machine, going back in time, becoming a general contractor, and then building your house but smaller? Smh, people won't go the slightest bit out of their way to make things better these days.
I think it would cost trillions of dollars to rebuild all houses to be smaller. Imagine the carbon footprint of that endeavor.
Nuclear is also a good option. It has the potential to scale up to our generation needs faster than green energy, and it can still be environmentally clean when any byproduct is handled responsibly.
Do I trust my government (USA) to enforce proper procedure and handling? Not really… but I do think we’re less likely to have a nuclear accident in the present day. Modern designs have many more fail safes. And I think it’d still be much cleaner than burning fossil fuels.
I think they need to coexist, though. I think a goal in the far-future should be a decentralized grid with renewable energy sources integrated wherever they can be.
Basically the one nation I would have most trusted to handle nuclear safely, Japan, couldn't even do it. The issue these days is not that the plants themselves are unsafe, it's that we live on a active and changing planet, and accidents can and will always happen because of so-called acts of God. The problem is that nuclear, when it goes bad, tends to go mega ultra bad in ways that are very environmentally destructive and heinously expensive to clean up. So even if there is only 1/10000 the accident rate at nuclear plants that there are at other power plants, the consequences can be a million times worse.
Why is your model for nuclear Japan? China is the world's forefront of nuclear energy research and development, keeps expanding its capabilities, and has a clean record with no accidents.
Regardless, you're overestimating the damage that nuclear has done in comparison with other energy sources. You could have one Chernobyl per year and you wouldn't come close to the death toll coal or oil have worldwide. Regarding Fukushima for example, since you brought up Japan: some recent studies suggest that more people have died as a consequence of the upending of their lived by the evacuation of the whole region, than would have died according to realistic statistical models of radiation damage to humans. The main problem is that fossil fuel lobbies have successfully made people completely intolerant of radiation damage while they happily live in cities breathing in NO2 and particulate matter without one complaint.
Humans would never cheap out on health and safety, or reduce regulatory red tape just to try to bring costs (and maybe, though less likely, prices) down. Unheard of.
thorium is nuclear too...... (and doesnt seem to have the same runaway problems!)
Not working great so far. I’m 100% for renewables and fuck fossil fuels, but despite the press about renewables finally being cheaper than fossil, it isn’t being passed to the consumer yet.
Don't even have to invest. In my area, a 100% renewable supplier was about 30% more per KWH, all of that extra overhead was paid to keep old unprofitable coal plants online. That's capitalist efficiency for you.
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