Quote:
Originally Posted by cellsafemode
The market is at direct odds at what is good for them long term. That's the problem here. The market is more than happy to completely ignore the good of the future for the good of now. Throw in some dirty cheap now and even temporarily more expensive but clean future has absolutely no chance.
It's absolutely the governments job to counter that. It's the governments job to look out for the public's future. And unlike some things, we dont have time to make the alternative better than the current in the market. By then, it's too late.
It would be like not forcing everyone to buy insurance. Most people if left to their own devices would not buy insurance until they need it - which is too late for it to work. Ditching fossil fuel before you absolutely need to requires that extra intervention because if you wait until you absolutely need to, you have a dystopian scenario where the economy collapses while we scramble to replace things we didn't start replacing ahead of time because the market was fine using the existing crap that was cheaper until it couldn't.
edit: i mean if you agree that it's going to take something like 50 years for the population to be totally off gasoline powered vehicles. And you expect pollution levels to basically at best be level but more likely to increase.... then any plan to keep that pollution level (or try to decrease it) has to start 50 years before it's too late. If we were running out of gasoline, we'd have to start moving things away from it 50+ years before we got to the levels of gasoline reserves where the amount becomes too small to sustain the global economy. Basically, any good replacement has to start while the current solution still looks viable in order for you to mitigate collapsing your nation's (or the global) economy. The market is not going to make those kind of long term decisions on it's own. The future the market would create would be far worse than what we're dealing with now by having EV's helped the way they are and forced phasing out of ice.
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You are making a fair point. The perpetual problem, however, is what/who to replace the market with, since everything else has already been attempted over the last few thousand years. However, a counterforce definitely needs to exist, no question about that, a sheer market drive is very short term, as you argued. This is the role that faith and morality used to, or is supposed to fill.
You're saying it should be the government, trying to enforce the "common good", well, the problem is the near irresistible temptation to focus exclusively on preserving the status quo and playing the "rules for thee but not for me" card while paying lip service to "common good".
Eventually this leads to eliminating all checks and balances and trying to suppress any dissent forever, all in the name of this "common good". This is more and more within the realm of possibility as technology advances. Heck, those in power can realistically attempt to redefine truth, language, history, culture these days...