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Especially when you consider the economic impacts of "going first" it puts the CCP in a position where they're likely to gain the economic output you've banned, and then use that to gain even more of an upper hand against you

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What are you talking about. China has already “gone first” they drove solar costs down below fossil fuel energy production cost. The change to green energy and decarbonization is a huge Keynesian economic stimulus. Decarbonizing is not about impoverishing yourself it’s about modernizing everything with tools that are demonstrably better in almost every way using government backed debt. It’s going to be a huge driver of GDP growth for the next 25-50 years. The political blocker here is that a lot of members of the capital class are very invested in the current fossil fuel energy production paradigm and will have relatively less wealth on the other side of this transition.

The reality here is we can and should use a nearly infinite amount of debt to finance decarbonization. Debt is “borrowing money from the future” and do you think anyone 50 years from now will be saying “I think we should have spent less money on decarbonzing?”, absolutely not. There is no world in which we can muscle the political will to spend that much money today, so for all intents and purposes consider it an unlimited credit line.

“ China has already “gone first” ”

Nobody believes this. China has a horrible record when it comes to pollution, and to make the opposite claim is a bit outlandish.

Here’s a question: why does 75% of all Bitcoin mining occur in China[0]?

[0]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22256-3

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