re: #4 Aceofwhat?

Sure. Whatever. I’m the sort of stubborn individual who will stand around and say that it’s the millions of Republicans who aren’t behaving as true republicans, but i certainly understand that it’s more typical to say that I’m the RINO.

But you, in no way, shape, or form, represent the Republican party. Those that do, have views that aren’t in the least bit in line with yours on this issue. It’s not that it’s more ‘typical’.

Nota Bene: Large-scale infrastructure needs presume that a favored technology or process has already been chosen. That’s a few steps ahead. I am talking about the process of choosing the best technologies, a process best left to the millions of smart people across the nation and not in the hands of the folks we tend to elect to our legislature.

I have lost track entirely of what you’re talking about. How on earth is the free market going to determine the best alternative energy, when what we’re talking about is the inability of the free market to evaluate technologies on ineffables like their impact on the environment?

If the government needs to tax fossil fuels because they have a negative impact on the environment, aren’t you admitting that the free market doesn’t actually choose technologies well in this case?

Unless we think that the insurance accurately reflects the risk of loss, which AFAIK we don’t, government-sponsored insurance would not fall under the rubric of ‘distorting subsidy’.

Nobody else will provide insurance for them. Only the government will. There is no free market insurance for nuclear power plants.

Because we don’t yet know which clean energy source will turn out to be the best investment, depending on the situation.

And? Why do we need to select the ‘best’? Putting all of our eggs in one basket is nuts. We know a lot of solutions that are promising, and we need to focus on quite a few of them. No one energy solution is going to be the magic bullet.

We would discover that for ourselves if the entire nation, including the military, was taxed into a sudden urge to discover the most efficient replacement for fossil fuel for a particular application.

And they might come up with corn biodiesel instead. Which the government would then need to penalize because it’s not actually a good solution. So in the end, you really are relying on the government figuring out the best solution, since you’re relying on them to correctly evaluate the negatives from any particular technology. Somehow, you don’t trust them to evaluate the positive aspects of stuff, but think they’re brilliant at evaluating the negatives.

The logic of that escapes me.