Originally Posted by
furloughfuntime
you realize the government has been subsidizing the oil and gas lobby for decades... the government "picking winners and losers" as you call it has always been going on, so I don't really understand this objection.
regardless, the way the "free market" prices fuel externalizes the cost of carbon pollution. Just because you can get gas for 2 bucks a gallon doesn't mean there are not other costs incurred downstream. This is why people advocate carbon pricing, because it harnesses the free market to solve the problem of carbon emissions by including externalized costs in the price of fossil fuels.
That may well be.
But the challenge is rapidly transitioning to a different system while the current one has many economic stakeholders... if you discount the stakeholders (including tens of millions of working people in the US alone) and just assume they're all going to eff off and die when their livelihoods vanish you're going to fail politically. Solutions have to account for political realities... ESPECIALLY since the problem at hand is nebulous, controversial, and very hard to define in specific terms of exactly how and when the problem will play out.