Climate change costs $16 million per hour in damage, mostly due to extreme weather events. Policymakers should use this data to allocate funds to help countries rebuild.
You'd think this would give us some wiggle money to play with to build out new energy infrastructure. You're wrong though, there is no wiggle. We need all renewables like Germany.
Although the transition to EVs will require an enormous increase in base production capacity, it would be wasteful to build out nuclear to meet it.
$16m an hour might seem like a lot of damage, but nuclear can only exacerbate economic loss which is equally important as climatic loss.
Aren’t they ahead of many other developed nations? Just because they’re not perfect or their journey isn’t complete doesn’t mean their progress isn’t worth taking inspiration from.
And in 6 years, we will end coal as the first nation of the industrialized countries. The US is currently planing to phase it out in 16 years. Some other countries do not even have a plan for the next 20 years. What is your point?
There are more fossil fuels then just coal though. You could squint and if you were paid to be dishonest you could say that Lignite isn't coal and therefore in 6 years when Germany is still burning Lignite, they have transitioned away from coal. Additionally they are not planning on transitioning away from Natural Gas at all.
In Econ there's opportunity cost, I think that's what companies end up losing, the greater profit they could have made (if they were like a bit less short term oriented).
Sure, but that's generally ignored by company owners and investors. All companies try to do is to maximize profit for each quarter, this tends to be the singular metric which is completely at odds with any sort of long term planning.