Thread by @Noahpinion

Today's @bopinion post is about why subsidies for electric cars are good and important:
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Trump wants to kill subsidies for electric cars, probably for no other reason than to poke liberals and Democrats in the eye.

But we need electric car subsidies, to help fight climate change.

Climate change, in case you aren't already aware, is a huge, immediate, and growing problem.

"Why not just do a carbon tax instead? It's more efficient!", replied every policy wonk in the room.

Well, carbon tax is good in theory, but in the real world we have a free rider problem.

Even if U.S. emissions dropped to zero overnight, the climate change problem would still be extremely severe, because Chinese emissions are so huge. (washingtonpost.com/energy-environ…)

Thus, a U.S.-only carbon tax would mainly be for purposes of symbolic moral leadership.

The best thing we can do for the climate is to create new super-cheap green energy technology and spread it around the world, so that it's in every country's self-interest to go green.

We've already had great success making solar power super-cheap. And this success is expected to continue.

Crucially, solar cost drops didn't come from some whiz-bang breakthrough technology that raised the efficiency of solar cells. It came from the accumulation of tons of small innovations; by making lots of solar cells, we learned to make them more cheaply.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1070431729846906880

But to really solve the energy problem, we need STORAGE. Especially BATTERIES.

Fortunately, batteries look like they also have a learning curve. So by encouraging companies to make more of them, we encourage them to discover a ton of tiny innovations that make batteries cheaper.

rameznaam.com/2014/09/30/the…

Far from being some inefficient special-interest giveaway with only a marginal impact on the climate, electric vehicle subsidies are actually an important and useful thing we can do to help solve the global problem!

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