[HN Gopher] Congress is poised to increase energy bills by hundr...
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       Congress is poised to increase energy bills by hundreds of dollars
       per household
        
       Author : rntn
       Score  : 30 points
       Date   : 2025-06-08 19:27 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (grist.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (grist.org)
        
       | m101 wrote:
       | "Clean electricity has zero generation cost,"
       | 
       | There are so many problems with this article.
       | 
       | Let's just go with the headline- so it might raises energy bills
       | by $250, but on the other hand cut taxes by $500?
       | 
       | Most things that require subsidies don't work because they are
       | _more_ expensive solutions than the alternatives that exist in
       | the market. Supporting those programmes will necessarily cost
       | _more_ overall (hence the 500 number I made up above is bigger
       | than the 250 number they made up).
        
         | micromacrofoot wrote:
         | a lot of subsidies ease early adoption and help scale up
         | manufacturing and installation so prices can come down
        
         | tzs wrote:
         | In the case of subsidizing clean energy I believe that most
         | analysts have found that it results in a big net improvement in
         | the long run.
         | 
         | Markets can get stuck in a local minimum where even though
         | there is another local minimum that is lower than the current
         | local minimum the market on its own won't move to that lower
         | minimum because the cost to get out of the current local
         | minimum is more than individual actors can afford.
         | 
         | Also in the case of clean energy there are benefits that aren't
         | captured in the market price of clean energy or the price of
         | fossil fuels, such as the effects of pollution. Pollution from
         | fossil fuels leads to a lot of health costs in humans and also
         | significantly reduces crop yields for example.
        
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       (page generated 2025-06-08 23:01 UTC)