You’d think this would give us some wiggle money to play with to build out new energy infrastructure. You’re wrong though, there is no wiggle. We need all renewables like Germany.
Although the transition to EVs will require an enormous increase in base production capacity, it would be wasteful to build out nuclear to meet it.
$16m an hour might seem like a lot of damage, but nuclear can only exacerbate economic loss which is equally important as climatic loss.
Renewables now!
Germany is in no way a role model when it comes to renewable energy.
Germany has made great sacrifice to be a leader in renewables. An example for other nations of what can be accomplished with confident determination.
Germany is heavily relying on coal: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/coal-germany
It’s also building inefficient LNG terminals for liquid gas. Far away from being a leader in renewables.
Furthermore EVs are not a solution for climate change, but rather to save the car industry, which is particularly strong in Germany.
Hard coal and lignite have a share of 35.3 percent in German power production (compared to 35.2% from renewables, 11.7% from nuclear and 12.8% from natural gas in 2018).
As of five years ago they were also heavily relying on renewables according to your source.
The past conservative governments have slowed down renewables unnecessarily. But one of the biggest successes of the world destruction lobby is to make people believe the energy transition was hard. Don’t focus too much on the little things. Look at the big picture: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&legendItems=01
That economic loss isn’t affecting the people it needs to affect for there to be real change. That’s the problem.
Privatize the Profits. Socialize the losses. It is known.
It’s not costing the companies that are causing it anything though because the cost is subsidized by the public.
In Econ there’s opportunity cost, I think that’s what companies end up losing, the greater profit they could have made (if they were like a bit less short term oriented).
Sure, but that’s generally ignored by company owners and investors. All companies try to do is to maximize profit for each quarter, this tends to be the singular metric which is completely at odds with any sort of long term planning.
Yeah fair enough. They’re too busy sowing the seeds of their own destruction and can’t see the forest for the trees.
And even if they did, in many cases they’d be legally obliged to ignore it in favor of profits this quarter. At least in the US.
Oh, is that all?
As long as it doesn’t affect profits, nothing will change.
That’s still cheaper than the wealthy paying taxes.
