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. In other words, because clean energy hasn’t happened, there is no reason to make it happen.
I asked the caller if he happened to be a hard-line libertarian who believes government has no business effecting changes in the public landscape. When he said no, I indicated that his position strikes me as considerably shortsighted, in that it employs a kind of circular logic. It’s like saying that we shouldn’t have built the Internet in the 1990s because there were a only few people online; his argument is really no better than that.
And in the case of renewable energy, I pointed out, we’re talking about a subject that really doesn’t compare well to the Internet; the imperative to move to clean energy goes well beyond the convenience and niceties of our modern age. Whether your concern is long-term environmental damage, national security, lung disease, the ballooning national debt (just take your choice), we are dealing with 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 — long past the point that the industry became incredibly profitable. Yet Washington is so completely bought off by the oil companies and the 7000 lobbyists they employ that it simply doesn’t have the integrity to bring this disgusting state of affairs to a close; this is rank 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 renewables should be subsidized through the year 2190 — and on indefinitely.
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