I'm not sure, I'm in Poland and all we had was coal. Now it will take a few decades to have our own source of power again. Maybe 20-30 years..?

What are oil companies doing to drive European companies out of business (not saying they aren't, I just don't know)?

Poland still has majority coal power production! It's one of last places you can possibly blame renewables for pricing.

Well, green initiatives made us stop using coal.

Also, we've started exporting because of carbon credits--which caused prices to skyrocket.

prices in poland are dictated by coal. Coal got insanely expensive due to co2 taxes

Correct. Exactly my point.

So, it's not renewables fault, it's that you're no longer getting away with distributing your negative externality over the world for free.

I'm sure my sewer bill would be a lot lower if I could just pipe my sewage into your garden.

Co2 tax is less about externality and more about putting this extra money into renewables. When ren are underperforming but bidding low prices, they will still be compensated by the merit order which is artificially bumped even higher with CO2 tax.

And the worst thing is other regions like US or China don't have such a tax, causing industry offshoring. It's a noble case to want to subsidize ren sector, but this method is hurting EU more than helping

They could put the money into renewables, but there's nothing mandatory about that policy choice. The idea of a Pigouvian tax is to eliminate the market distortion negative externalities create. In general, you want to tax things you don't want, like pollution, not things you want, like productive work.

yes, but since this tax is done only at EU level, it causes industry offshoring and $ redistribution. EU could have just subsidized ren more instead of this tax. This way electricity/production prices would be lower while ren tech still supported

Industry offshoring is dealt with via CO2 tariffs, which the EU has also introduced.

Subsidizing production is itself a market distortion.

Only small part of the problem is dealt with tariffs. And these were introduced only recently.

Market is always distorted one way or another depending on the goals. Co2 tax too is a market distortion since the tax value is chosen arbitrarily

Very weak arguments there. Adding distortions is ok because other distortions exist? Non sequitur. Tariffs don't currently do everything therefore they cannot ever solve the problem? Also a non sequitur.

Yeah. Very weak. Just like German economy.

Europe, especially central and eastern away from the coasts, is in the unenviable position of being the renewable energy armpit of the world. So their choice is either not be competitive in energy-intensive industries in a renewable world or continuing to be competitive in a fossil-fuel-doomed world.

This dilemma leads to various kinds of magical thinking, like "nuclear will save us" or "climate change isn't real".

for nuclear at least we know what final result may look like, in France. We know both costs and timeline to achieve decarbonization. We also know more or less the same about Germany which took a different path, starting from 2000 under red-greens and schroder and continued by cdu. To me it sounds much more magical to hope DE will have anytime soon abundant cheap hydrogen to firm it's 80GW+ of gas plants according to Fraunhofer's ISE plan.

I'm from Poland too and the only thing we have is land, the sun, and wind. Coal poisons the air we breathe, and hurts the climate our children will live in. It's not about money, it's about security. The worst thing for polish security is being dependent on foreign oil and gas, and to be reliant on a few power plants that are an easy target for russian drones, and rely on water from rivers that are running dry more and more often. The transition away from coal should've come much, much sooner. When you hear a push back against renewables, and people praising oil and gas, who's benefiting from this? Poland, or oil suppliers like Russia?

I like nuclear.

But I think it's a huge investment that would take decades.

I'm fine with supplementing with nuclear, but it's still a single point of failure, and needs water. France and Switzerland had to shut down nuclear plants last year because the rivers got too hot. This issue is not going away.