"common sense" is common sense because it is not "specialised sense" or "expert sense"

So if politicians base their decisions on "common sense", they confess to not being able to use experts that refine their knowledge and position about a topic.

A "common sense" strategy is therefore what is most popular and on the basis of the understanding of laymen without deeper understanding or knowledge.

There are too many interested parties involved in the energy sector. The only common sense I can think of is solar+storage at the single building level and interconnected through smart grids with neighbours.

But that leaves out the government and all those interested parties so we're never ever getting that.

Subsidies (via tax or lack thereof) on aeroplane fuel is one that really does get overlooked. Yet on the other hand, use a few gallons in a car and you're demonised as a climate villain in name and taxes. Nobody factors in life of the car, the cost to dispose and replace the batteries in electric cars, or the whole aspect that cars made today are less serviceable than cars of old that its gone from being able to rebuild the car in your garage to waiting for spare parts from a dealer as it's all just replace or scrap today. So much focus on the short term, without focus on the larger picture and impact.

Indeed. Energy is at the core of everything we do. Make it more expensive, you immediately make some people go hungry, and then you also make everything else in the economy a tad more expensive, slowing things down, and as market readjusts and contracts, this makes even more people go hungry.

There's a really strong incentive to keep energy generation cheap, because pretty much every social and political issue is downstream of it.

Just like "first principles", "common sense" differs from man to man.

It probably comes from the recognition that energy access being a common good, a tax-collecting government should work for its constituents in helping provide energy at a reasonable cost, especially if the subsidies support an improvement to the technology behind it.

Subsidies aren't universally a bad thing. This is silly thinking.

- calculate in all building cost, side cost, post-lifetime cost, accident risk cost etc. i.e. "all cost"

- calculate expected total produced electricity which can be used

- divide one by another

- if one if majorly cheaper and chose it then that is the "common sense" strategy of choosing what works best

yes the "all cost" part is tricky to estimate.

yes you don't choose a "single technology and only use it", resilience always works best with redundancy and diversity.

still you can run the number, you can estimate error bars, and sometimes this gives already clear answers. Like a technology being quite expensive even if you lose the lowest (unrealistic cheap) bar for all costs? Then that is a bad technology and it doesn't matter that you have very wide error bars as you are already looking at the optimal choice.

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EDIT: Me going of on a tangent, maybe ignore :/

Some technologies complement each other well (like most like solar + wind + some gravity storage, as both can have uneven output, but (at live where I live) extremely windy days are often reduced sunny and extremely sunny days often not so windy, and gravity storage can handle "dunkelflauten" sufficiently (and is has already been build and is in use(!), not some hypothetical tech like some people pretend it is)).

But also some technology works against each other, e.g. non _fully_ subsidized nuclear sells a roughly constant power output at a constant (and quite high! if not highly subsidized) cost. But if other electricity can "sometimes" produce supper cheap electricity for some hours, days or even weeks then nuclear can not compete _at all_ during this times, makes losses and need to increase the yearly average price to compensate. Which makes it even less competitive. Hence in a actual "dynamic/free" energy market nuclear makes no sense even if you ignore long term waste storage or risk for contaminating essential parts of your country risks. Still a _fully_ subsidized nuclear base power level might work if you can't generate enough electricity in average through other means. Still this IMHO makes it somewhat of a "only if there is no other solution, not competing on the free marked" choice, i.e. a bad choice you might have to do but might be able to fully avoid (e.g. by using hydro power).

Oh and please stop brown coal, especially low quality brown coal. In all categories of health damage, environmental damage, climate damage it has _horrible_ scores both during mining and usage even for modern versions with filters etc. Sure it looks cheap on paper, but it's maybe THE worst kind of power source there is. Especially if run on low quality coal and without modern filter technology. Brown coal should be a "never choose this no matter what" choice.

That’s a perverse incentive against ecology, case in point. Hear me out. We take citizen’s money to subsidize energy so they can get their energy for cheaper (at marginal level - while still paying the subsidy’s taxes) so they can undertake industrial/residential projects that we wouldn’t do with less energy. In a word, we incentive people to consume more (in a consumerist sense), which is bad for ecology, because we can’t afford them, and neither can the Earth.

Of course, leaving aside how petroleum is subsidized [through the department of defense].

While ecologists usually are in favor of subsidies, subsidies incentive people to consume more, which exhausts our Earth. We should develop less, i.e. we should develop in accordance with a higher facial cost of energy, which sometimes implies having a smaller home and fewer industries, which is what would happen if we didn’t sponsor solar or wind energy [or coal or fossil].