Anyone else feeling like $75mill is a really low number for something like infrastructure investment?
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More handouts for rich people? Sure does sound like it, when there’s no incentive to lower power costs once those facilities are more efficient. So rich people get money to improve their capital investments while poor people are left to starve. Thanks Dark Brandon!
How dare power companies get paid to transition away from fossil fuels without even demanding they reduce costs! If we can’t keep energy dirt cheap by burning fossil fuels, we don’t deserve to survive as a species!
We can just do both? Look at Norway’s hydropower strategy: the government owns and operates most of it, and they tax private hydropower. That’s significantly better than handouts. There are valid critiques of what the Dems are doing, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take the small victories we can (like this) nor does it mean republicans aren’t worse (they’ll just do even worse handouts to the rich).
But that isn’t doing both. This is subsidizing private hydropower. Taxing someone you just subsidized doesn’t make much sense.
By ‘both’ I mean we don’t have to either not solve this (climate hell) or just subsidize private hydropower, we can overcome both of those.
But… the point you brought up does lead me to talking about the Norwegian oil strategy that you might be interested in! Norway is doing exactly that: subsidizing private discovery of oil, tax the sale of oil heavily - and it has been very successful (to the detriment of the environment…). The US can learn from that by subsidizing private hydropower development (to incentivize building more of them) and then using targeted taxes when they’re actually operating. It’s the strategy that is often touted as “how Norway avoided Dutch disease / the resource curse”.
I didn’t actually mean subsidizing private hydropower above, though, I meant the government doing it themselves so that the profits are socialized rather than privatized. That’s mostly what Norway has done with its hydropower strategy. The case for taxes for hydropower, and natural resources in general, is basically the Georgist case: nobody invented or created the nature/land that allowed for that hydropower station, it was already here long before we were, so taxes make sense in that they socialize profits extracted by private companies.
I was wondering how this could turned into “they’re worse than Republicans”. Thanks for answering that.
