Quote:
Originally Posted by puckguy11
I'm far from an energy expert, but I feel like that despite our dependence on oil, alternative and renewable energies, at this point at least, are not a long-term solution. There's still a lot of work needed to determine what energies will and will not work or be viable and that I don't see it as government's role to force these energies on us.
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Actually it completely is.
Electricity and aggregate development is the role of the government. The government spends massive subsidies on the distribution of electricity, research and development, the extraction/production of energy, and the infrastructure needed for all these things to work on a mass level.
Oil companies benefit from massive subsidiaries, not just direct transfers, but in all the funding that the government provides in building an energy infrastructure. In fact, in most countries many energy companies are actually state-run monopolies.
Energy has
never been something the private sector can supply alone because of the inherent economies of scale in the industry.
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Additionally, these new technologies are not
the absolute long-term solution, but they are definitely
part of the long-term solution.