[gruez]

> This is well beyond ‘market prices will fix this’ - market prices will mean a very large chunk of the population will literally be unable to afford to cook dinner and heat their houses.

Advocating for "market prices" doesn't necessarily mean letting everyone fend for themselves. You can provide grants/subsidies for the poor, while still keeping market prices so everyone is still incentivized to save as much energy as possible.

>Edit: Big power retail companies in the UK are making record profits, and so is generation.

Sounds like a great way to discourage investment and make future shortages even worse. The energy industry runs on a boom-bust cycle. Why bother investing for the boom years (ie. right now) when you know the government is going to seize all your profits?

[AlexandrB]

Why bother investing at all when you can just buy back stock and make the owners/CEO rich[1]? If you think these companies are sinking their profits into investing for the future, you're dreaming.

[1] https://financialpost.com/investing/energy-firms-pay-record-...

[gruez]

1. As per BP's Q12022 reports, their capital expenditure was $2.9B compared to $1.6B of buybacks. Is that too much? Too little? I don't know. However, I do think your characterization is way too simplistic.

2. the boom-bust cycle is exactly the reason not to reinvest all the surplus profits now. You might intuitively think that investing now will help lower oil prices, but it takes years for an oil project to be online so by the time the project is complete there will be an oil glut.

https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...