Suppose the price of energy reflected its cost? It seems that the way we all make money is to extract oil and avoid the cost of using it. Almost everything in our economy involves applying energy to something. The “profit” we live off of seems to come from passing along the costs to the future.
I’m talking about global warming mostly, the cost of putting CO2 into the air. Nuclear energy costs a lot but that cost is really just the expense of containing the radioactivity — we pay that cost today but we don’t really have to. Nuclear would be cheap if we didn’t pay for shielding and cooling towers and just released the radioactivity into the air, the way we currently release CO2 into the air.
Suppose there was a law that said for every part CO2 you put into the atmosphere, you have to take out 3 parts? The PRICE of a oil or coal would then reflect the COST of so may years of putting CO2 in the air… but the climate change problem would start getting better. Imagine purchasing big solar-panel-powered machines that extract carbon from CO2…
Discuss.