A Sad Green Story - NYTimes.com
Then, in 2008, Barack Obama seized upon green technology and decided to make it the centerpiece of his jobs program. During his presidential campaign he promised to create five million green tech jobs. Renewable energy has many virtues, but it is not a jobs program. Obama’s stimulus package set aside $90 billion for renewable energy loans and grants, but the number of actual jobs created has been small. Articles began to appear in the press of green technology grants that were costing $2 million per job created. The program began to look like a wasteful disappointment.
...Suddenly, green tech looks less like a gleaming beacon of virtue and more like corporate welfare, further enriching already affluent investors.
...The U.S. government wasn’t the only one investing in renewables. Governments around the world were also doing it, and the result has been gigantic oversupply, a green tech bubble...[Solar panel] prices have fallen by three-fourths since 2008. Manufacturers will need huge subsidies far into the future — as Bradsher writes, “a looming financial disaster.” The U.S. share of the global market, meanwhile, has fallen from 7 percent to 3 percent since 2008.
The biggest blow to green tech has come from the marketplace itself. Fossil fuel technology has advanced more quickly than renewables technology. People used to worry that the world would soon run out of oil, but few worry about that now. Shale gas, meanwhile, has become the current hot, revolutionary fuel of the future.
Writing in Foreign Policy magazine, Daniel Yergin projects that in 2030 the worldwide fuel mix will not be too different than what it is today.
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All in all, the once bright green future is looking grimmer. Green tech is decidedly less glamorous, tarnished by political and technological disappointments.
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Global warming is still real. Green technology is still important. Personally, I’d support a carbon tax to give it a boost. But he who lives by the subsidy dies by the subsidy. Government planners should not be betting on what technologies will develop fastest. They should certainly not be betting on individual companies.
This is a story of overreach, misjudgments and disappointment.
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3 comments:
"Suddenly, green tech looks less like a gleaming beacon of virtue..."
This why we're in so much trouble people with the mindset of the author of this NYT article. Businesses are not the places to look for a "...gleaming beacon of virtue," and there is no "Suddenly" to it. Everybody should have known this subsidation of businesses built on "feel good" ideaology and not sound market based realities were destined for failure. Many people warned about this. Of course they were marginalized.
The government's promise to spend $90 billion to support to implementation green technology, yet failing to achieve much, if any, progress over the prior 4 years is a chilling inditement of a general capitalist and intellectual axiom: that, given the monetary incentive, Man's creative potential is up to any challenge. The problems we have, in this view, are circumstantial and either system or technology based. Solutions are always available once you put Man's mind to work.
This is apparently a false belief, at least in the human-specific short or medium term. Fusion has been saving our future since WWII. Notice that fusion technology is no longer discussed? Not even fission technology: the abandonment of nuclear power in Japan and Germany is based on the understanding that the inherent problems of reactor technology and waste disposal are unsolvable now and in the forseeable future. Money, fame, power have all failed to bring about nuclear powerplants that are successful, cheap or safe. Here we have "green" technologies such as wind, solar and water. Are any of these effective, economic or safe (meaning they will work for a reasonable lifetime, can be replaced economically, and dependable for a community)?
Man's ingenuity is not limitless, though that is another belief of the liberal faithful.
In business, the prudent provide for failure of individual projects. That's known as Plan B. What is the Plan B here?
"Global warming is still real"? You trust a government that mislead you once? You should read the recent report issued by the British Meteorological Service. According to them, there has been no statistically significant warming since 1998, something the models failed to predict, though CO2 has been rising uninterrupted. But they, like you, expect the warming to resume, maybe later, someday. The catastrophes predicted due to warming are based on, guess what....models. And you are willing to entrust additional taxes for carbon credits, based on erroneous models? Ludicrous. Global warming is a hoax.
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