Private - Public Partnerships

The Biden de-carbonization plan is all about the public subsidizing the private through de-risking. We struggling taxpayers will fund the research to make sure the technology is viable AND THEN private capital will step in so they can make guaranteed profit. It's post-late-capitalism, not quite China, but plenty of industrial policy disguised as free market. You might ask: since the State ( the taxpayers) takes all the risk, why wouldn't they just do all the investing and planning and reap all the rewards? Because that would be socialism. Rewards have to not just trickle but gush upwards to the 10%. Those who own Capital. If I can get a billion dollar loan from the government, why should a bank or venture capitalist take a risk on me? They'll send me to the government, wait for the technology to prove itself, THEN step in with a loan. This brings us to the Loans Program Office, where hundreds of billions are doled out to the Smart Expert People so they can leverage private capital for their high-tech schemes. The head of the program was interviewed by Robinson Meyer and the dude is the penultimate Techno-optimist and true believer in American Can Do. He also loves nuclear. And venture capital: "I don’t think that American innovators and entrepreneurs have a political party. They want to take their technology, they want to work with their venture capitalists, their private equity firms, their growth capital companies, and they want to build big things.Because let’s make no mistake: American innovators and entrepreneurs are an unstoppable force." So the only way to save the planet is through international capitalist competition for market share, through high returns on investment, through the same profit system which caused the polycrisis. And America will win. At least, some Americans, those not downstream from the uranium mine.