 |
| Click above for the video |
A bit nerdy. And a bit long. But informative.
I found the above talk really interesting. A couple of kind-of experts — Brett Christophers and Aaron Bastani— and of the Left to pretty-far-Left (if you consider Corbyn and Bernie, who the admire, far Left), who talk about Renewables with nuance and knowledge. Also pro-nuclear. And setting out the difficulty of being renewable-only, which the Labour Party in Australia, going hysterical anti-nuclear, doesn’t seem to understand.
China’s economy, says Christophers, is not capitalist, but “directed competition”, a pretty good summary, I think. Which allows them to quickly install wind and solar. Which they’re doing at a world-beating rate. Despite which they’re still full-on fossils and nuclear. Renewables, world-wide, are not increasing their share of energy output, despite huge increases overall, because the demand for total energy output is so high.
In democracies the problem is not that the cost of renewables is going down, but that the profit margin is too low for the private companies who are expected to carry out the transition. There are three proposed solutions: (1) Change the model from the old fossil-fuel based model to one suitable for solar and wind (2) keep the model but give the companies more subsidies (3) change to government-run Renewables industry. Brett discusses these towards the end.
From Brett Christophers’ new book “The Price is Wrong”:
What if our understanding of capitalism and climate is back to front? What if the problem is not that transitioning to renewables is too expensive, but that saving the planet is not sufficiently profitable?
This is Brett Christophers' claim. The global economy is moving too slowly toward sustainability because the return on green investment is too low.
Today's consensus is that the key to curbing climate change is to produce green electricity and electrify everything possible. The main economic barrier in that project has seemingly been removed. But while prices of solar and wind power have tumbled, the golden era of renewables has yet to materialize.
The problem is that investment is driven by profit, not price, and operating solar and wind farms remains a marginal business, dependent everywhere on the state's financial support.
We cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood remain unappetizing. But there is an alternative to providing surrogate green profits through subsidies: to take energy out of the private sector's hands.
3An essential intervention, The Price Is Wrong is as politically far-reaching as it is factually illuminating.
