Looks like the current Australian and Canadian governments (Harper) want to fall into the extraction-economy trap and giving incentive to clever people to move elsewhere. Sad.
It makes some twisted sense though: What's a good position to be in, if you're a ruler?
Answer: You don't have an educated populace that might displace you or call you on your BS, and you don't need one because your economy exists upon extracting natural resources and only doing basic processing on them before export.
The "extraction-economy trap" comment reminded me of Jared Diamond's book Collapse. It has a chapter titled "Mining Australia", which starts like this:
> Mining in the literal sense -- i.e. the mining of coal, iron, and so on -- is a key to Australia's economy today, providing the largest share of its export earnings. In a metaphorical sense, however, mining is also key to Australia's environmental history and to its current predicament. That's because the essence of mining is to exploit resources that do not renew with time, and hence to deplete those resources. Since gold in the ground doesn't breed more gold and one thus has no need to take account of gold renewal rates, miners extract gold from a gold lode as rapidly as is economically feasible, until the lode is exhausted. Mining minerals may thus be contrasted with exploiting renewable resources -- such as forests, fish, and topsoil -- that do regenerate themselves by biological reproduction or by soil formation. Renewable resources can be exploited indefinitely, provided that one removes them at a rate less than the rate at which they regenerate. If however one exploits forests, fish, or topsoil at rates exceeding their renewal rates, they too will eventually be depleted to extinction, like the gold in a gold mine.
> Australia has been and still is "mining" its renewable resources as if they were mined minerals. That is, they are being overexploited at rates faster than their renewal rates, with the result that they are declining. At present rates, Australia's forests and fisheries will disappear long before its coal and iron reserves, which is ironic in view of the fact that the former are renewable but the latter aren't.
> While many other countries today besides Australia are mining their environments, Australia is an especially suitable choice for this final case study of past and present societies, for several reasons. It is a First World country, unlike Rwanda, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and China, but like the countries in which most of the likely readers of this book live. Among First World countries, its population and economy are much smaller and less complex than those of the U.S., Europe, or Japan, so that the Australian situation is more easily grasped.
(i've typed this out manually from my copy of the book, any stupid typos are my fault, etc)
"Looks like the current Australian and Canadian governments (Harper) want to fall into the extraction-economy trap and giving incentive to clever people to move elsewhere."
People will move away from Australia because there they would have to pay for their solar systems out of their own pockets?
No. But clever people who work in the clean energy sector will.
We have already seen investment drop in the sector as a result of the constant undermining and ensuing uncertainty. When companies leave, clever people do too.
Actually Saudi Arabia is planning to install huge amount of solar. Mainly because they want to sell more of the black stuff abroad rather than use it internally.
It makes some twisted sense though: What's a good position to be in, if you're a ruler?
Answer: You don't have an educated populace that might displace you or call you on your BS, and you don't need one because your economy exists upon extracting natural resources and only doing basic processing on them before export.
See Saudi Arabia.