plucky tree

the win-win scenario that we’ll lose

If there were some way to reduce world government spending by hundreds of billions of dollars a year, while significantly reducing CO2 emissions and igniting the alternative energy market, you’d think the government would be all over that, right?

Not so fast:

Call to Stop Fossil Fuel Subsidy

People think that libertarians don’t care about the environment or only care about money. The truth is that libertarians are keenly aware of how money motivates people and businesses. If you subsidize something, you encourage more of it and you hurt free market alternatives that would likely be better.

Instead of doing the sensible thing, I expect we will continue to subsidize bad industries while at the same time subsidizing the clean industries, but not so much that the bad industries get worried and put pressure on their congressman.

Fossil fuels would be long gone by now if not for government intervention, keeping them artificially cheap and delaying the time when renewable sources will become highly competitive.