pErvinalia wrote: ↑Tue May 01, 2018 4:05 pm
Oh WTF? I can't take your shit seriously today (not that I take it seriously most days). Fossil Fuels are HEAVILY subsidised. And even if they weren't,
They aren't.
https://www.realclearenergy.org/article ... 10091.html
According to the apolitical U.S. Energy Information Agency, the federal government spends about $3.5 billion per year subsidizing the coal, petroleum and natural gas industries. By contrast, the Feds dole out about $15 billion every year in subsidies to the renewable energy industry (mainly to support new wind and solar projects) and $20 billion per year for agricultural subsidies and insurance.
Don't believe the EIA's subsidy calculations for the fossil-fuel industry? Last year, in an effort to eliminate all direct fossil-fuel subsidies, President Obama asked his U.S. Treasury Department to figure out how much the industry gets in subsidies from fossil-fuel specific tax code provisions. The answer, according to the Treasury: $4.7 billion.
Regardless of which number you believe, these fossil-fuel subsidies pale in comparison to the $15 to $20 billion the fossil-fuel industry has to shell out to its competitors and the agricultural sector every year because of the Environmental Protection Agency's renewable fuel standards program.
pErvinalia wrote: ↑Tue May 01, 2018 4:05 pm
since when does the majority of the right give one fig about "free markets"??
What the right cares about is a different issue (whataboutism...). The issue you were asking about is why the sustainable energy thing would be considered a left wing issue. It's because, like climate change politics, it comes with left wing baggage -- there are specific policy proposals that come along with the neutral sounding name that are left wing.
pErvinalia wrote: ↑Tue May 01, 2018 4:05 pm
The steady move of the political centre to the right since the 80's has resulted in a near corporatocracy. There's no fucking free market or anything like it eventuating out of the right.
Well, the only place free market policies are advocated from are the minority of free market libertarians and libertarian Republicans. The right wing conservatives are not that, I'll give you that.
You talk about this steady move to the right since the 80s, but we are certainly closer to socialism in the US now than we were in the 80s. Not sure what it's like in Oz, but here we had a freer market in the 80s than we do now, we have far more regulations and burdens on private business than we did then, we have a far more left wing tax policy than we did when Reagan was President in the 80s, and our education system is far more left wing now than it was then. If anything, in our institutions and government, the left is winning over here.
“When I was in college, I took a terrorism class. ... The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said ‘Al Qaeda’ his shoulders went up, But you know, it is that you don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity, you don’t say ‘England’ with the intensity. You don’t say ‘the army’ with the intensity,” she continued. “... But you say these names [Al Qaeda] because you want that word to carry weight. You want it to be something.” - Ilhan Omar
