Mark Gongloff
There’s good debt and there’s bad debt. Good debt is a $465 million government loan for your fledgling electric-car company that helps it become the world’s biggest automaker. Bad debt is maxing out your credit cards to buy cartoon apes in 2022.
Depending on your politics, you might consider a government taking out loans to finance the clean-energy transition to be bad debt. But economists keep pointing out that a little bit of deficit spending to fight climate change today will save a whole lot of deficit spending tomorrow, to not only fight a rear-guard action against global heating but also to clean up the expensive mess it will make.
Unfortunately, the politics of green government spending aren’t exactly having a banner year. European parliamentary elections hit green parties particularly hard, the UK’s Labour Party has scaled back its climate plans, and the deeply climate-unfriendly Donald Trump stands a real chance of winning a return to the White House in November.
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