What? Opportunity costs are the loss or added expense that arises from a decision. If you choose to buy wind with gas as backup, the opportunity cost is the difference between that solution and the best alternative. The best alternative is of course to only buy the gas, and not bother with the wind at all. The opportunity cost of buying capacity twice and running both but only selling output from one or other at a time is huge. It doesn't affect only one company, the only way any company would make such a decision is if they are forced to by regulation. The reason why nobody would deliberately invest in the way you want is that the OC makes it implausible unless they have no competitors who are more logical.
Nice try, but don't make up your own definitions of well known concepts next time.
Your concern then is misplaced. I am entirely agnostic regarding the correct solution, what annoys me is trying to reverse illogical crud into the problem in order to arrive at a predetermined solution even though everyone here is able to point out what you cannot see - that it doesn't solve the problem.
My only words in favour of nuclear came about in the case that you found a level of of carbon tax that might make it cheaper to have nuke for your backup than gas or coal. Economically gas is obviously the better solution. If we must indulge your abject terror of carbon dioxide, then clearly nuclear is the best available power source right now. The cost of cleaning up afterwards are far less than the many trillions you are concerned about in your CO2 panic. It doesn't emit CO2, which seems like something you would like. And it can at least keep operating without requiring gas fired backup for when the weather decides to crap out. So if your case were rational, you would be the one arguing for nuclear but I would still be the one arguing for gas on the basis of opportunity costs and technical imperfection.
That assumes you know what the "true cost" is, which is in itself a falsehood. But if you care to make an estimate, then you will necessarily base that estimate on some assumed cost, which you must quantify. Presumably it would cover the "true" cost of compensating for rising sea levels, mega storms and whatever other silliness you imagine is right around the corner. If you then work honestly and with intellectual diligence you will look at how much it costs to reduce carbon emissions sufficiently to prevent that altogether using various methods, and then you will tally up the scores. And then you will realise that imposing giant opportunity costs through malinvestment is not a solution. The bad numbers that support the imminent catastrophe you need in order to get worked up over this, will also make the meagre carbon reductions you could possibly achieve quite hopelessly inadequate.
One fundamental difference between you and I is that you always panic and assume everything you are talking about will amount to a giant world eating disaster. That's why you predict so many preposterous outcomes (civil war and revolution in the most unlikely places, and that weird nonsense you spouted about paying old people to kill themselves to pay down the national debt all spring to mind).
This is just another example, global warming will not have any such effect in anything close to that timescale. It will take centuries for global warming to have anything more than a very marginal and easily remediated effect on human activity - and that's assuming that the next ice age isn't on the way. The only reason I am even in favour of carbon emissions reduction at all is that it is generally irresponsible to pollute, and that too much carbon in the air seems to be bad for the fish in the sea.
The simple and sane truth is that it will take at least one or two decades to refine the many competing power sources into a genuine replacement for fossil fuels. Maybe three or four. Either way investment is required on a grand scale, and so is what, in the grand scheme of things, amounts to a very short amount of time. Your plan involves a huge amount of money being spent on a trivially small - if even extant - reduction in carbon emissions now, but offers little hope of accelerating the reduction over time because all of the investment is waste. My suggestion is to plough the same money into development of viable alternatives without the waste of deploying substandard [LIFTED] and paying farmers to have it on their land etc.,Then to rapidly reduce carbon emissions when the right balance and techniques are found. Start with a low CT, let it rise slowly, then let it go once it becomes irrelevant as it must if the correct alternatives are found. Then when the time comes for the big investment in rolling out product, the investors won't need regulatory sweeteners because the investment will be good, and the opportunity costs will be in your favour, leading to rapid adoption.
The only rational argument for inducing large scale spending on actually rolling out these incomplete alternatives that we are vomiting up today is that it seeds a market that may one day arrive at self sufficiency by encouraging private investment. But that is a bad argument - and I am the one here who is most inclined towards liberal market based solutions. Nevertheless, it always and in all cases wrong to promote malinvestment, so I prefer for a tax to be collected by governments and then spent by them on finding the best among the many solutions and then refining the most promising until they are actually ready and can be deployed in a manner that actually achieves the desired goal.
No you can't. You think you can, but that only shows that you either still don't understand what opportunity costs actually signify, or that you have again forgotten that they are inescapable with current green technology due to the fact of it not working on dark windless nights when the tide is in.
