Via this Gruaniad comment, this article listing `faltering or bankrupt' US green companies that have received government money.

Krugman provides the basic riposte: "because the private sector never ever puts money into ventures that end up failing." But I thought it worth throwing in a couple of things from here - from Albert Bravo Biosca's `growth dynamics' presentation. The data is from a UK pespective but compares to the US and Europe.

1. Of UK businesses that started in 1998, ten years later only 37.5% survived. Only a very small percentage had anything like strong growth in that ten years.

2. A "5% increase in share of static firms = 1% lower annual TFP [technological frontier of production] growth" . So more stable firms in aggregate means less innovation overall.

So: businesses fail - the majority, in fact. And high failure rates actually correlate to higher innovation overall. The presentation also has data showing Europe to be more static than the US too - there is thus both higher churn and higher innovation overall. Creative destruction indeed.

Of course, people citing failure of government-supported firms generally oppose government intervention of any kind. But in order to make the case they want to make, they'd have to demonstrate those investments are always worse than comparable private sector support. They'd also need to show some statistically significant difference of failure rate between green tech and other business investment. Given how many firms fail, though, a strategy of "listing failed firms" is pure cherrypicking. Shock.

As Ha Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans explains in some detail (echoing List) governments have often provided support and a degree of protection to fledgling industries. The trick is to strike a balance between that and propping up unsustainable organisations (or deciding that some service isn't suitable for the private sector. I know, some people don't really understand those last six words...)

The rest of the presentation is well worth looking through for US/Europe comparisons and some great data-driven contradictions of common business memes (e.g. there are no `high growth sectors'; high growth is a stage some businesses go through; most high growth is from firms over 5 years old...)

A quote from Rebecca Solnit via Caroline Lucas talking at the closing session of the Tyndall Centre's radical emissions reduction conference:

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

A quote from Rebecca Solnit via Caroline Lucas talking at the closing session of the Tyndall Centre's radical emissions reduction conference:

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

From Jorg Friedrichs' The Future is Not What it Used to Be (p.3-4):

For the sake of the argument, assume that world economic output continues to grow by 3 percent per annum. This implies that global GDP will double within twenty-three years, and quadruple within forty-six years. It also implies that, a century from now and other things being equal resources consumed and pollutants emitted will have increased by a factor of more than sixteen. It is easy to see that such enormous growth would not be sustainable. The obvious objection is that resources consumed and pollutants emitted can be reduced by efficiency gains and other forms of technological progress. So let us assume, again for the sake of the argument, that resource intensity and thus pollution can be reduced by a fairly ambitious 50 percent. Even so, under the above scenario, a century from now the world economy would consume eight times as many resources and emit eight times as many pollutants as today.

To continue the thought experiment, let us demand that the world economy should grow for a century by 3 percent per annum, but without any increase of resource consumption and pollutant emissions. By how much would it be necessary to abate the resource and emission intensity of the world economy (resources consumed and pollutants emitted per unit of GDP)? The answer: by a staggering 94.8 percent. To reconcile a century of 3 percent growth with the more ambitious goal of reducing resource consumption and pollutant emissions, the abatement of resource and emissions intensity would have to be even more drastic.

Kevin Anderson via the Tyndall Centre's radical emissions reduction conference page:

"The next five years for the principle emitting countries of the world - in that I also include the 300 million people in China who live lives like those of us relatively wealthy ones within the EU - if the high-emitting people on the planet have not radically reduced emissions [within 5 year's time] we will have effectively locked ourselves into a high carbon future. We will have locked the poor people around the planet, our own children and most other species into a future that will be somewhere between detrimental and disastrous. It's hard to know exactly how that's going to play out, but it's not a future you'd want to bequeath to your own children, let alone other people's children, let alone the planet itself. I think we're on that cusp. The rate of emissions growth is so rapid, if we don't come off that curve in 5 years from now, the emissions will be so high that we're talking about 3 to 4 degree type futures."

We just lost a proposed £4 billion, 1.2 GW offshore wind installation. RWE cite `technological challenges and market conditions'. We're spending £16 billion for 3.2 GW of nuclear and a whole load of uncertainty about waste the taxpayer appears to be responsible for.

Offshore windfarm: £3.33 billion per GW vs nuclear: £5 billion per GW. Oh good. (Looking here the windfarm output figure is an annual average output based on meteorological models/data, not peak output, so should be comparable.)

Let's hope this was more `technological challenges' than `market conditions' and that the market conditions didn't include mixed signals from government. Losing 1.2 GW of carbon-free generation right now? Madness. (Yeah, I know there's carbon in the production of wind turbines...)

I'm for nuclear too: despite the issues involved, Hinkley Point is still 3.2 GW, whatever the per-watt price. But it's awful to see projects like the Atlantic Array get so close to reality and then fail.

"You have millions of people here in the affluent part of the planet who turn their heads. They see the house on fire; they see the child screaming from the upstairs window, and they say: I’ve got to go to the library and read a book about combustion because I don’t know enough about fires."

Danaher, K., ‘Changing Culture: Choosing Life over Money’, in Welton & Wolf, (Eds.), Global Uprising, (2001, Canada, New Society Publishers), p.28

A quote from Ed Glaeser:

"The internal combustion engine was more than just another, faster commuting technology. The car is a point-to-point transit method while all of the older technologies were essentially hub-and-spoke, where people walked to a stop and then took the bus or train. The car made it possible to live at lower densities since it was unnecessary to walk to any bus stop or to walk to get groceries or perform any other function. The second impact of the internal combustion engine was to break down the traditional monocentric city. These cities were generally built around a port or a rail yard but that transportation infrastructure became increasingly irrelevant over the twentieth century. Trucks don't require central stops and as a result, factories could be decentralized. The decentralization of employment has led to much flatter cities that look and feel completely different from the monocentric cities of the past." (Glaeser, `Cities, Agglomeration & Spatial Equilibrium' 2008 p.46)

Another second-hand post via a P3 comment. I wish I could let those rants loose here a bit, seems commenting elsewhere lets them out. Anyway, here's the second half of the comment:
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Update: this thread's picked up over at Stoat's blog.
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I've been having a rather odd week listening to some people who, in theory, accept the science of climate change but have bought a truckload of political assumptions with them. I never used to think this was a problem: so, some left-leaning people accept the science, perhaps for non-scientific reasons? So what? Now I'm not so sure. A recent example from Naomi Klein that kind-of captures what I mean - actually citing Tyndall Centre scientists too, arguing for degrowth as the only effective response.

I have no problem with scientists having views on what should be done, but I am worried about lazily assuming climate change just happens to support your political view. Right-wing laziness is its mirror: reject the science rather than think about political solutions that would work.

It's a severe cultural problem. Last night I heard Duncan Clark lecturing on his and Mike Berners-Lee's book, the Burning question. Spot-on stuff. The follow-up round of questions from mostly left-leaning academics (of which I'm one) made me uncomfortable. I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that anyone sees an issue through the prism of their own views on how the world should be - of course we do that. But there's something about the climate change issue that really makes me want to run in the other direction: there are solutions that have naff all to do with, say, getting rid of consumerist culture. I keep on posting this, but David Mitchell nails my feeling on it. There's a version of the future where - hmm, maybe not the North Pole - but where Jeremy Clarkson gets to drive a 4x4 to the South Pole while drinking gin - only it's not powered by a carbon fuel. That's culturally unacceptable to many on the left, but climate change absolutely does not rule it out. (Maybe some other environmental issues might intervene...!)

The future may the constrained - but it always has been. The problem isn't the existence of constraints, it's backtracking from our current position. I still want a future where, if someone happens to want to spend all their money on some awful gas guzzling monster that I hate because I'm a tofu-knitting Guardianista, they're fecking allowed to. This may be self-justification. I don't fly or drive, but I'd quite like to pay the 5p ish an hour for my stupidly power-hungry graphics card, so I can play childish games, without being made to feel like I'm stealing winter fuel from an old age pensioner. (I'd also like policies that protect OAPs from the cold, but again: climate change doesn't actually stop us, if we want, from marching old people out onto freezing moors and letting them die of exposure as a way to conserve resources...)

I suppose this is just a variant of the hairshirts vs techno-utopians thing, but... well, not really. That's the thing I like about the price system: me getting to decide I'm OK with my 5p-an-hour watt-guzzling eternal adolescence and someone else being OK with their stupid 20 foot high truck with wheels the size of small cars. There's a bigger question there about distribution of wealth - but that's emphatically NOT a climate change question, despite what anyone may argue.

Urgh. Leftie guardianista arguing for more space for right-wing ideas in climate discussion.