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Vaniver comments on How should negative externalities be handled? (Warning: politics) - Less Wrong Discussion
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Subsidizing efficiency improvements sometimes leads to a net increase in pollution, and so this is more appropriate for things like subsidizing disruptive technologies than subsidizing improving existing coal plants.
I'm under the impression that nuclear is one of the few where decommissioning costs are baked into the operating costs, and thus comparisons between it and other technologies are biased against nuclear.
This is primarily when the efficiency improvements make a previously niche technology viable over a much broader range of cases. Already-dominant technologies don't suffer from this to nearly the extent. Cases where the efficiency is not the limiting factor on usage do not suffer this effect at all.
Like, if cars took a tenth the gas they do now, people wouldn't drive ten times as much. They'd drive some more, and buy more SUVs and winnebagos, but unless a colossal number of people are held back from using a winnebago by gas prices, that would only partially compensate for the efficiency increase, because people are already doing close to as much driving as they care to. Back in the 1970's this was not the case at all.
This isn't just the Jevons paradox, though that does amplify this. It's also the claim that while a tax and subsidy are equivalent in the short-run, in the long-run the tax decreases the profitability of the polluting industry while a subsidy increases the profitability of the polluting industry, which may lead to increased pollution.
The subsidy itself will also make the technology viable over a broader range of cases, yes... should have mentioned that part. Tried to get too clever.
But only by granting higher standards of living, which are also a goal of the government.
Not necessarily; the subsidies have to come from somewhere. (I should also point out that I'm making a somewhat technical point, here, and so unless you can sketch the curves involved we may be talking about different things.)
Yeah, we're talking about very slightly different things - I was ignoring the opportunity cost of the subsidy in my mental model. Whether or not subsidizing an efficiency improvement benefits standard-of-living (compared to alternative uses of that money) depends entirely on the relative cost of that subsidy.