Respectfully, who cares? Humanity needs electricity, and "cost" is an entirely made-up thing. "Sorry, it was too expensive to save civilization" is going to be the most obnoxious epitaph for Homo sapiens...
Cost is an artificial construct (see: oil subsidies, corn subsidies, EV subsidies, and so on). "It's too expensive!" is such an uncreative response to technology we desperately need to stop overheating the planet.
Cost describes tradeoffs. Environmentalists ignoring costs and generating a backlash that completely undoes their work shouldn’t be a lesson needing relearning twice a generation.
Thank you for saying this. I didn't have the patience, and it's a rather subtle issue with a lot of nuance.
Tradeoffs are indeed inherent in any human effort, but actual market prices are an imperfect reflection reflection of those inherent tradeoffs, and can indeed be distorted by subsidies, externalities, etc. And often tradeoffs cannot really be reduced to a single scalar the way costs do—not everything can be traded off against everything else.
Yet that observation does not mean there aren't any real tradeoffs, or real tradeoffs that can be reduced to a single number.
Also, while this god's-eye viewpoint of the options available for collective action by humanity as a whole is important, for most of us it isn't useful tactical or even strategic information about the possible courses of action we could undertake to affect the world, much less our own lives. It's most useful if you're a billionaire, a Central Committee member, or a Civ player. For the rest of us, even Bilderbergers and the like, those subsidy-distorted costs and the failures of collective action that produce them are merely facts about the world; we cannot make them evaporate in a puff of logic by pointing out their irrationality.
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