Late-Night Radio Show Caller Throws Tantrum Over Subsidies for Renewables

2GreenEnergy — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 18:30:37 +0000

I got a call shortly after dinner last night from a radio host in Denver, explaining that due to a last-minute cancellation, he had an hour-long opening on his show. He asked if he could call me for the interview – at 1 AM!

I agreed, stayed up late, reading, checking out Jay Leno, and fighting off the yawns.

The highlight of the show for me was a caller attacking clean energy based on the fact that the government subsidizes it. When I pointed out that fossil fuels get 12 times the amount of subsidies as clean energy, he responded that since clean energy is only 2% of the total grid-mix, the subsidies it receives represent four times those of fossil fuels per installed megawatt.

I’m not sure how to argue this. Of course, if you don’t believe in government subsidies for anything at any time, that’s one thing. But if you’re not in that camp, the caller’s position strikes me as considerably shortsighted, which I told him. It’s like saying that we shouldn’t have built the Internet in the 1990s because there were a only few people online; his point is really no better than that.

And here, I mentioned, we’re talking about a subject that transcends convenience and the (few) niceties of our modern age. Whether your concern is environmentalism, national security, lung disease, the ballooning national debt (just take your choice), we need to be concerned about real dangers here that government, I believe, is duty-bound to address.

I also note that the subsidies for oil have been in place for 80 – 90 years. Washington is so completely bought off by the oil industry and its 7000 lobbyists that it simply does have the integrity to bring this sad state of affairs to a close; this is corruption in its purest and most obvious form. By contrast, you’ll have a hell of a hard time finding an advocate of clean energy who thinks the industry should be subsidized until the year 2190.

Copyright © 2008-2010 CleanTechies, Inc. and Partners
This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only.
Written by 2GreenEnergy. To the comments
(Digital Fingerprint: b008bf120fbd682ffd7ee5812c495c9a)

Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)

Will Washington’s Clean Tech Spending Spree Pay Off?

Joe Walsh — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:04:26 +0000

Jennifer Kho this week asks what I can only assume is a rhetorical question on Green Inc. Blog at NYT, “Is Washington the New Wall Street for Cleantech?”

There was almost $30 billion in the stimulus bill that could be described as allocated toward cleantech. Lobbyists are flocking to the Hill on Waxman-Markey, and they don’t work for free.

There is ample evidence that angels and VCs are now second fiddle to the American taxpayer when it comes to cleantech capital for the next generation of innovation and investment.

To me, a more debatable and salient question is: Given that VCs and angels are looking for ROI – usually explosive ROI from the “killer app” – they have a certain set of criteria that they use to evaluate who and what gets funded; the government on the other hand has no such interest. Their interest is not in seeing a technology achieve commercial success, it is in policy advancement, political gain, maybe even – gasp! – some patronage.

Does that shift in the key investors’ priorities mean that we will see money spread around on a bunch of pie-in-the-sky projects or hopeless technologies instead of being thrown behind the most competitive, and innovative ideas?

In my mind there is no debate. We may get to the same or similar endgames no matter who is funding the technology development, but with the government doing it, it will cost A LOT more to get us there in the aggregate.

Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

CleanTechies Blog - CleanTechies.com » lobbyists

Late-Night Radio Show Caller Throws Tantrum Over Subsidies for Renewables

Related posts:

Will Washington’s Clean Tech Spending Spree Pay Off?

Related posts: