Do you believe we should have never built the intercontinental railroad because we had to give the railroad companies subsidies to get it done?

Would you advocate for stopping the satellite industry because the first rockets failed?

Would you advocate for no personal computers because 170 computer manufacturers failed?

Have you ever contemplated the cost of computer hardware when it first emerged?

I paid a bit over $8,000 (2011 dollars) in 1983 for a 30 MB hard drive. That’s $266,667 per gig.

Now I can buy a 1.5 TB drive for $130. That’s $0.09 per gig. A 3,000,000x price drop.

Solar panels cost $50+ per watt a few years back. Now they are dropping under $1/watt.

The price of electricity from wind has fallen to at least a third of what it was only a few decades ago.

The price of both wind and solar will continue drop, especially solar. Wind is expected to drop only another 20% or so.

Subsidies are necessary for a while longer. They are investments in our future. We are going to end up with inexpensive electricity from wind and solar and without the problems of burning fossil fuels.

Patience grasshopper….

The Republicans very badly want President Obama to fail so that they can get one of there people into the White House which will allow them to reduce taxes on the wealthy/corporations and eliminate social programs.

Republicans want to eliminate financial and environmental regulations so that corporations can make more profits.

They are willing to keep the economy in bad shape in order to further their ends.

Please do not put everyone in Congress and the White House in the same bucket and toss them overboard. Spend a little energy and try to determine who would vote for legislation that would improve the country and who would turn us into a bunch of serfs.

Remember, Republicans control the House of Representatives. The President cannot sign a piece of legislation that would help the green economy unless both the House and Senate first send it to him.

Don’t blame the carpenter for not finishing your house if you haven’t sent him the materials he needs.

We haven’t given President Obama the Congress he needs to move the country forward.

Bit choice in November. Hand control to Democrats and get back to work, leave the government divided and accomplish little, turn control over to Republicans and our lives over to corporations.

There’s a huge amount of energy arriving from the Sun that can be benignly collected using Wind, Solar, hydro and in future probably wave. There’s more energy available from the formation of the earth and solar system: geothermal, tides.

Removing barriers to what is good for sustainability and restricting the unsustainable looks like a pre-requisite for a good economy. It will be a massive boost to the whole world as the jobs it will create will be distributed widely and it will reduce the numbers of people working in unsustainable areas of the economy.

If we do honest accounting renewable electricity will be cheaper than coal produced electricity. Once the price of EV batteries drop it will be significantly cheaper to drive with electricity (we have already reached parity).

We’re not going to run out of energy and we’re not going to pay significantly more for our energy, quite possibly less.

My stab at some fuzzy logic would be…
1.) Humans have economies, animals don’t.
2.) Humans have intentions (plans/hopes), animals don’t.
3.) Perhaps economics is a study of Human intentions.
4.) If robots develop intentions, they can have economies.

But equally importantly,

5.) A destroyed ecosystem will destroy Human intentions. IE – Who wants to save for a holiday if the all camp grounds are toxic? Going through history we see that economic decline usually happens in step with ecologic decline.

A couple of days ago Larry Summers (economist, Sec of State under Clinton, etc.) wrote an op-ed piece opining that this was a perfect time for the government to borrow money and spend it for future good.

Interest/bond rates are so low that if we got the economy going by the time it was time to pay back the money we would have to pay back less than we borrowed, due to inflation.

Borrow some money. Make loans available to wind farms and large solar arrays. Give them very sweet interest rates. Create jobs (tax revenue). Stimulate local economies (tax revenue). Start a profit stream from the new installations (tax revenue). And then get the money back and pay off the bonds.

Risk? Low. Close to no wind farms or solar arrays “fail”. A few might “stumble” but someone can pick up the pieces and complete the job. The components are mature technology.

This will lead to an exponential increase in robot capability as they take over our design role. The slow and error prone process of evolution by random variation and natural selection will not be able to keep up with that. Humans will have to draft the assistance of the robots in reengineering ourselves our clumsy design to keep up.

We’ll evolve by design to become homo machina. Assuming that is, our robot President has emancipated us.

I’m sure that when we see numbers for those working in the oil industry Exxon and Chevron don’t subtract out the number of employees who work as janitors, secretaries, etc.

Clearly floor sweepers in hotels and restaurants get counted in the total number of people working in the hospitality industry.

I’m fairly sure most people don’t think that there will suddenly be an army of engineers, and installers. They’re aware that the creation of green jobs also entails jobs ‘around’ the green industry.