Green energy, the cost-efficient option
Despite huge subsidies for fossil fuels, eco-friendly alternatives are making headway
Topics: Alternative Energy, Energy, Environment, News
Among the standard epithets often leveled at green energy is the one about subsidies. As the conservative myth goes, green energy is allegedly not “cost competitive” with dirty energy sources like coal or natural gas. This, we are led to believe, makes green energy just another wasteful taxpayer-supported boondoggle for dominant special interests. In this version of the story, big, bad all-powerful solar, wind and insulation companies are supposedly getting government handouts to unfairly oppress the earnest mom-and-pop oil and gas industry.
As laughable as it is to portray oil, gas and coal companies — some of the wealthiest corporations in the world — as underdogs, the narrative’s Machiavellian brilliance should be obvious. For both the global fossil fuel industry and a conservative political movement underwritten by oil barons like the Koch brothers, the mythology self-servingly casts environmentally friendly alternatives as inherently ill-suited to free market economics. In the process, it convinces millions of consumers and entrepreneurs that even if they want to go green, they can’t do so in any sort of economically viable way, meaning they should just keep guzzling as much fossil fuel as ever.
But in an up-is-down political arena where being a millionaire is “struggling” and where pure unadulterated fabrication is now the norm, a recent spate of headlines are starting to show us that the true energy story is exactly the opposite of the mythology.
Here’s the truth: In the real world that exists outside the media and political theater, fossil fuels rely on massive public expenditures to rig “free” markets against green industries, which don’t get nearly the same level of taxpayer support. Indeed, as Bloomberg News reported in 2010, “Global subsidies for fossil fuels dwarf support given to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power and biofuels” — and that doesn’t even include the subsidies inherent in federal lands being regularly leased for fossil fuel development at bargain basement prices. At the global consumer level, that makes fossil fuels comparatively lower priced than they would be in a true free market, thus encouraging more fossil fuel consumption than ever.
David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and the best-selling author of the books "Hostile Takeover," "The Uprising" and "Back to Our Future." E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota.





Comments
3 Comments