The huge scale of investments required to do Net Zero CO2 Emissions would raise China’s GDP by as much as 5% later this decade, with a modest ongoing positive impact due to reduced fossil-fuel imports.
China’s investments would not only drive dramatic reductions in its own CO2 emissions, but would also lower the cost of clean energy, creating a positive “spillover” effect in other countries.
That's something the confuses me; wouldn't switching to green energy be good for capitalist? Massive spending to getting it done, tons of money to be made off of it. Is it literally just that the fossil fuel companies have that much control?
I mean, it's complicated. The energy companies really would like to move towards renewables and IIRC are continuing to move more and more money into it, if not because they care about the environment then because they know everything's going that way anyway so they can either be leaders now or give up the field to someone else in the near future.
That said, they can't just drop fossil fuels in the short term and expect to stay in business. Ironically, the more money they invest in renewables, the more fossil fuels they need to sell in the short term to break even on it.
Interesting, thanks for the info. I've read that most of these energy company's value is in fossil fuel reserves they own the rights to. So if we actually were to move on from fossil fuels or even just start or commit to it these companies could literally lose most of there value overnight.
Switching to renewables eliminates the strongest commodity on planet earth. No one is richer than oil companies.
There's no money in renewables because what are you even going to charge for beyond the initial investment and maintenance?