If the left analysis goes no further than "sticks vs de-risking subsidies" and openly embraces all of the above, maybe the left is fetishizing the particular consumer product too much, at the expense of clear thinking.

This will add to new home costs; will necessitate means tested loans for buyers; will create a vampiric dependency on solar services firms to make the most of the panels; and will require subsidies from utility rate base to compensate exported energy, whose value decreases the more there is.

A muscular social democracy could do so much more space-faring than if we leave the endeavour just to markets.

We need leftwing space policy, not leftwing anti-space ideology.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Finally, it’s not enough just to make the left case for space; I show how the left can do space better: Private space firms can only provide such services as are profitable. Yet there is far more that society needs to know from space than merely the information that can make money.

For all its purported sobriety, anti-space ideology amounts to an anti-humanist critique that unwittingly embraces a politics of neoliberal austerity while ironically undermining our ability to deal with the manifold ecological and social crises we face.

So I make the left case for space, arguing that space science *is* earth science, *is* social science, and that we cannot combat climate change—and many social challenges as well—without it.

It is a great shame that space-faring has become right-coded, when it is indeed For All Mankind.

Some on the left have reacted against certain space-fanatic billionaires whose names rhyme with pesos and husk by viewing space-faring as an elitist toy, or even ‘settler colonialism’, saying we should stop polluting our planet before we head off to pollute another one.

Our biggest barrier to decarbonization is the legacy of green anti-nuclearism and the neoliberal economics that blocks nuclear deployment, not the emergence of new sources of load on the grid.

We start with cleaning of the grid rather than saying there must not be any additional new load until the grid is clean. Another option is to incentivize large new sources of load to locate themselves in places with already decarbonized grids, like BC, Quebec, Norway etc.

3 different approaches to abundance: one is that it is a sufficient condition for the good society (right &, to a lesser degree, centre); second is that it is necessary but not sufficient (socialist); third is that it isn’t necessary (green left).