[a green flag with a leaf stands above an utopian green city with vegetation and clean energy]
Greenists believe that the world should be a better place for green people, and everyone else too
[an orange fascist-looking star in a gear logo stands above a bleak concrete city]
Orangites believe that the world should only have orange people, and that all greens should be hung
[an orange character speaks smugly, in a bedroom that contains an orangite logo and a greenist/orangite flag]
Me?
I’m a greenist-orangite,
why do you ask?
The greenists would like to help the homeless and feed the needy after they block an industry and remove those dirty jobs, if only it didnt ruin the character of the neighborhood.
Greenists would open up newer green industries and create new infrastructure projects. With all the help being thrown around the might not even be people going hungry or ending up on the streets.
What’s an example of a green industry. The failed battery plant we threw billions at, or reselling Chinese coal produced solar panels?
Nuclear power, solar/wind/hydro/thermal? power, public transit projects, forest management and other ecological projects that can all create jobs.
Which battery project in particular are you saying is a failure? Can you provide a source for what makes it a failure?
I’ve heard recently that solar panels have been having breakthroughs that extend their useable-life.
I’m sure ramping up and subsidizing local production of solar panels could make it more eco-friendly. However, I’m personally interested in nuclear power, specifically getting thorium reactor projects going.
Is this outlined in a plan with feasibility at all, perhaps by a green party, it sounds like it would be an interesting read. Nuclear sounds good, and I know Brookfields Westinghouse does it already, I just dont understand how the other industry would outcompete China in manufacturing. They use coal to produce their solar and wind, and they have all the refining capacity. Which I’d also assume the material refining would need to be carbon free here to satisfy a green party, making us even less competitive in manufacturing green products.
It’s feasible by taxing corporations more, that’s the important part.
You don’t necessarily need to compete with China if your panels are made with more ethical and sustainable business practices. In theory you make a deal with your allies to buy yours because you went the extra mile to do it right. You’d want other goods in such a deal though if you want to take the pressure off of China because they are able to produce theirs via less sustainable practices.
On the grand scale, we’re pretty late in terms of manufacturing to compete with China unless we did something more drastic like convincing a lot of people to live and work in the US. We could be a bit protectionist about our fledgling industries if we want to scale manufacturing more, but that will bring some trading trade-offs with any countries that we don’t have a trade deal with.
Our economy is mostly service oriented because we did all this offshore manufacturing decades ago, but now workers have less access to manufacturing jobs although there is still room in the market for our manufacturing sector to grow.
What you’d be doing is taxing existing non-green industries, so investment flees, and Canada’s productivity problem becomes worse. Then you have nothing to make the green industries profitable, because once youre out of somebody elses money you fold.
When you tax these big companies, they may try to move to another state, but if it’s coming at a federal level it’s not something a company can get away from without exiting the market as a whole. Which, would a foolish choice for any company to make if they want to retain the money they made in that economy. They can’t exactly cash out if they are in the stock market for instance. Furthermore, any company that would like to leave would leave behind a hole in the market for a competitor to fill.
If companies flee to Canada for instance but are not already in the Canadian market, then they are having to compete against existing companies in that market. They may falsely assume that the consumers there will have the same buying preferences that they have in the US. This was the case for Starbucks for instance when they were trying to enter the Italian coffee market a while back.
There’s a bit of a misunderstanding of how money works in macro economics. A competent government doesn’t run out of money, effectively, since they have power over the money supply. Now, you can’t really just print more money in the long run and expect everything to work out, but if your money is backed by assets then ‘you’, the government, can spend it to fuel the economy.
Money spent = The economy keeps spinning
Money not spent = Great Depression
Money being spent is such a good thing for the economy, that it is the entire reason most country’s economies want a little bit of inflation ~1-2%. When the economy is put in a state where it is propped up by big corporations, those corporations not spending money actually slows down the economy and in some ways actually lowers their potential to earn more money down the line.
Money not getting spent means there is less money to go around to upskill the workforce, there’s less projects getting started, and less jobs means less money getting created by work.