We need state intervention for green energy and jobs

One of the big reasons why I'm happy to back developing countries such as Venezuela in their use of gigantic states is that developing the big infrastructural projects that both left and right visions of government need for survival is often impossible without them. Stalin is the archetypical example. Many millions died because of him, which is plainly murderous and immoral, because this was, famines excepted, completely escapable. But without the thousands of tractors created to mechanise farming, millions would have continued to die from starvation and disease that would otherwise have taken hold. Only the state was capable of getting tractors to a peasentry which could not afford tractors, despite the overwhelming need of both the peasentry itself and the wider country for the proceeds of mechanised farming.

Now, this applies to energy in the so called 'developed world'. The private sector companies which extract our fossil fuel dependent energy supplies are, following years of mergers and takeovers via the capitalist medium of apparent competition, slow, crude and self interested monopolies. They have a great interest in the long term in developing towards harvesting green energy and making the changeover, but they know that this will mean enormous risk, and almost certainly a good deal of restructuring and downsizing. They are competing against each other to do the least.

In situations like this, the initiative of a state liberated from the imperative of immediate market concern, and with a wider geographical, financial and temporal strategy is essential.

Perhaps when oil companies end up facing ruin at the hands of the inevitable state enterprise(s) which will result, they will finally convert to green industry, and rejoin the struggle for competition and privatisation.

In capitalist history, the state employee does the work, and the execs and big time shareholders at the private companies with little incentive to respect the public interest eventually take the spoils. I guess that's currently the natural path of development. But it does seem like they're browbeating the rest of us into an awfully long route towards something which is, at the end of the day, a sort of decline.