Anyone else feeling like $75mill is a really low number for something like infrastructure investment?
Seems like a fairly low investment. Just read Zuckerberg gets like 700M per year salary. Weird world.
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!
I was wondering how this could turned into “they’re worse than Republicans”. Thanks for answering that.
That’s not what I said.
Are you a climate change denier or one of these that wants it to happen?
Hydro is a fantastic power source and a vital part of the transition from fossil fuels. If you look at the list of selected projects they’re all pretty decent and benefit local economies as well as the national energy strategy.
Yes it would be nice if Biden could wave a magic wand and change America into a socialist utopia but the reality is he has to work in the system that exists and which a disappointing majority continue to want to exist.
He’s whatever fox “news” tells him to be, and a shitty troll.
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.
