I guess the argument is, that there is just some initial resource usage to get a self sufficient mars colony and all further development can happen without resource strain on earth

Why not? India could easily leapfrog fossil fuels, and replacing coal with renewables would even have a positive impact.

I can’t think of a single thing where people damaged their surroundings and following generations didn’t have to pay more for that then what earlier generations got out of the destruction.

> Housing market is the worst, too little houses are being build because of all the rules.

I find other reasons way more convincing:

Construction can’t keep up with efficiency gains of the rest of the world. This has less to do with regulation and more with failure to automate as much. Basically baumoll’s cost disease.

Centralization means that everyone wants to live in the same places. We hardly can create new land to build on, especially where we need it the most.

Missing or wrong regulation of cars in cities. They take up an enormous amount of space.

Financialisation of the housing market. Housing can either be affordable or a good investment asset. Not both.

Utilities are very capital-intensive and lining money incurs interest. If you let the state run utilities you will also pay profits in the form of the interest for bonds. The government pays lower rates, but there’s a strong push to keep government debts down while private debts are mostly ignored.

It also means that with lower costs your service becomes more attractive and maybe attracts more customers, so might even grow the number of workers.

This is known as Jevons Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Yes, and a lot of people have gone broke assuming unlimited demand for the services they provide.

It's not so surprising when considering googles history coming from inexpensive commodity hardware. It's pretty similar to how it took decades for x86 servers and operating systems to gain mainframe functionality like virtualisation.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-a-computer-the-google...

Once again IT comes full circle.

> Nuclear plants need to pay for the cost of storing their spent fuel on site indefinitely.

I highly doubt that. If you multiply annual costs with the timeframe needed (millions of years) you get absurdly high numbers.

I guess you’re talking about Germany. Shutting down nuclear reactors and huge imports of Russian gas are two entirely separate things.

Gas imports like explained in the Wikipedia article you linked started in the 70s. There certainly was too much of a reliance on Russia, not enough investment in alternatives like LNG terminals and warnings of partners in the east were ignored with the north stream pipelines. In the end Germany got a lot of economic growth from cheap gas for decades and managed to get off Russian gas very fast. The European nuclear industry on the other hand is still heavily reliant on Russia.

Broad German anti-nuclear sentiment can be traced back mainly to Chernobyl and the exit plan that was followed in western Germany was decided after Fukushima. Eastern German reactors lacked containment and were shut down after the reunification. Contrary to an often heard claim western German nuclear was not replaced by fossil energy sources, but more than compensated by the growth of renewables. You could certainly point out that coal plants should have been shut off first, but that was even less possible politically at the time. In the end you have to shut off nuclear reactors because of growing safety risks caused by material fatigue and new ones have questionable economics.

Even better is to measure real performance at your customers.

Yes!