Given how wildly profitable they are, we should be passing laws that they must produce X % of their power needs from renewable sources, where X approaches 100%. This would be a jobs program that would also help the planet. Win win.
Investors would make slightly less money in the short term, but our grandchildren will be able to live. I think that is a good trade off.
This could/should(?) be fixed by taxing CO2 emissions. I'm not sure what it works in e.g. the US, but some countries have this stupid idea that electricity prices have a build in CO2 tax, but applied to all consumptions, not just that produced by CO2 emitting sources.
Let's say Microsoft could save 25% on their electricity bill by consuming power from wind farms, I think they'd work out a way to do more AI training when the wind is blowing and scale down when more power is delivered from coal.
The ship has sailed on carbon taxes. It's good policy but voters don't like it, so politicians will never do it. Voters have shown to be okay with direct subsidies and permitting reform, so that's what we must do out of sheer pragmatism.
All other measures than procing in the externalities will create perverse incentives to suck up subsidies and grants. It just uses the power of the market to figure out the best
> Investors would make slightly less money in the short term
Why do you assume that the tax incidence falls on investors, rather than on customers and/or employees? With sales tax or VAT people tend to automatically assume 100% passthrough (so that the incidence falls completely on customers/consumers) even though they're also collected by companies. In reality taxes are borne by a combination of customers/employees/owners, with proportions determined by their relative price elasticities, rather than by who lawmakers appointed to collect the tax.
> In reality taxes are borne by a combination of customers/employees/owners
That depends entirely on where the money comes from.
If the company does not reduce profit, then yes, they must raise prices and/or reduce employee salaries.
But if we are willing to put the taboo topic of reducing profits on the table, profit can just be reduced without any impact to customers or employees. I realize this kind of talk is blasphemy, but it clearly needs to be done.
> if we are willing to put the taboo topic of reducing profits on the table, profit can just be reduced without any impact to customers or employees
We’ve capped profits in various industries before. The benefits didn’t flow to customers and employees equally, they flowed to specific employees and specific customers. (You also see R&D grind to a halt.)
There isn’t a clean technical solution to this social problem, that of redistributing wealth indirectly. At the end of the day, if you want investors’ profits, you have to take them directly.
I'd prefer that we priced in the externalities of emissions from pollution. If we should burn less coal then that can be acheived by taxing coal until it's again a net positive to society.
Is that X% in moment or in total? Which is critical distinction. Overall might not be too helpful is renewables at time massively over produce. Electricity is fungible only in moment. And storage is nowhere close...
You could have someone getting paid to waste electricity during over-production while this wasted amount will somehow still count when coal is being burned...
It is ridiculous to place these demands on energy consumers. Microsoft and Google aren't operating heir own powerplants to generate energy in the quantities they need (some other companies, e.g. VW partially do), for that they are relying on other companies, which sell them their energy.
If and only if those other companies are able and willing to produce the required energy mix, then the desired mix used downstream can be achieved. Obviously the only organizations which can make such a change are energy providers.
The energy provider could say "why should I be the one eating the cost of providing sustainable energy?".
The ones consuming energy also need to take their responsibilities. "When we think that it would suffice people didn't buy it for it not to sell!" (Coluche).
In fact, this is a collective issue we are all part of (including as individuals: we use the services consuming energy).
>The energy provider could say "why should I be the one eating the cost of providing sustainable energy?".
Where did you get that from? He could also force the additional cost to the companies.
>The ones consuming energy also need to take their responsibilities. "When we think that it would suffice people didn't buy it for it not to sell!" (Coluche).
You can not buy energy which doesn't exist. If less renewable energy is produced than the consumer needs, the legally required energy mix is impossible. Obviously the alonly person which can change which energy is produced is the provider.
>In fact, this is a collective issue we are all part of (including as individuals: we use the services consuming energy).
There is exactly one group of people responsible for the energy mix. The energy providers. Obviously any change can only come from them and demanding change from anyone, without first demanding change from the providers is obviously ridiculous.
Not sure about Google but AWS was planning to do that by 2030 and is seemingly on track to do that by 2025.
> Amazon is the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy and is on a path to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025—five years ahead of our original target of 2030.
Remember when every company and government all had 2020 plans? Someone should collect all those plans and follow up and see how many was actually implemented, split on "by chance" or "deliberate action".
They mostly are. You don’t need laws… when you want good data center distribution you’re going to be putting DCs where the grid can’t support such a step change in consumption. So they need new energy production, and it’s typically going to be renewable
I'm not sure if investors will agree. The general way the stock market works heavily favors shortsighted thinking. They'll say après moi, le déluge and then package the déluge up into sellable financial instruments.
Why does it matter whether e.g. a hospital runs on renewable energy or not? Why is "industry" good but "data centers" are bad?
If some companies care enough about their image to pay extra to buy green energy, that's good! It makes that production more profitable, and encourages more such production to be built faster. Why are you trying to disincentivize that with "greenwashing" slurs?
Because the global goal of all that is the CO2 emissions that we emit __today__.
I'm perfectly fine that we start big plans to build many new nuclear and renewable plants, but __today__ we need to emit less CO2, now. CO2 just add up in the atmosphere and don't degrade in the time we have.
SO, in the quota we need to respect, I prefer to ensure that the today capacity we have of "clean energy" are used for a proper usage better than allocating the current clean, and upcoming clean ones to some Google servers that are used to generate AI images for fun.
If your house is on fire you don't use the water you have to fill up your pool, you actually need to turn off the fire, even if you will have more water soon.
> prefer to ensure that the today capacity we have of "clean energy" are used for a proper usage better than allocating the current clean, and upcoming clean ones to some Google servers that are used to generate AI images for fun
You’re proposing capping economic growth to save the planet. Admirable. But with tremendous, almost guaranteed, capacity for backlash.
Empirically, growing economies green faster because while we should treat climate change as an existential crisis, we don’t, we treat it as a luxury.
> If your house is on fire you don't use the water you have to fill up your pool, you actually need to turn off the fire, even if you will have more water soon
The house isn’t on fire. It’s settling wrong. It won’t burn us in minutes but bury us in decades. The analogy is in quitting your job to start repairs even though you don’t have the cash on hand to finish them.
Oh, so your objection isn't to them buying green energy, it's to them buying electricity at all?
Google and Microsoft are clearly more effective users of energy than many other commercial users, i.e. creating more value per watt spent. In a situation where you're going to snap your fingers and killing companies or entire industries by refusing to sell them electricity, you don't want to go for the efficient energy users. You want to go after the ones where the energy is adding the least marginal value.
> should raise taxes, especially for large coorparations and in higher income brackets
Google and Microsoft are large corporations. Their employees and investors are high income. OP proposes curtailing their growth. That reduces those taxes. That’s why OP’s suggestion is a false economy.
Energy, in this context, isn’t a zero sum game. Tax Google and Microsoft more and use that to pay for more power.
This logic just doesn't hold up, regardless of where the intentions behind the decision land. All those energy consumers are going to use the energy one way or another. Prioritizing nuclear+renewables just means that those energy production receive a premium for their production, which hopefully encourages further investment in building out more in renewables, which in turn continuously brings down the cost of consumption until it returns to equilibrium.
Maybe there's an argument in there somewhere around the lossiness of transmission, but I have no idea what it would be.
> The production is physically limited, if you have the money and power to be green, the others are not and you can seriously slow down the transition.
This doesn't make sense. If big players are eating up all the renewable sources, then the renewable sources are making money hand over fist and are encouraged to expand. The market forces should speed up overall production of renewables, not slow it down.
Is this plan actually help decomittioning fossil fuel ? I have some doubts.
Adding more renewable on top help having... more renewable, that's great, but if you don't have a clear plan to remove the fossil fuel (meaning closing down coal, gas, oil sources) you don't change the emissions pathway.
Investors would make slightly less money in the short term, but our grandchildren will be able to live. I think that is a good trade off.