Overreach, misjudgments, and disappointment

Concept by One Architecture, Ton Matton, and NL Architects. All photos from Design/Applause.

 David Brooks writes (annotations by the ed.):

The salad days of green technology were back toward the beginning of the millennium, around 2003, when you had some respectable, bipartisan people, like Senators Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman, working out ways to milk it. I saw my first solar-powered calculator in the relatively fuel-efficient Mercedes of an extremely conservative, extremely wealthy person I would love to name if he wasn't so private about who gets to ride around in his back seat, who told me these doohickeys meant that we would soon get to tell the Arabs to take their oil and give themselves a petroleum enema; and he was just one of a host of entrepreneurs, movie stars, and newspaper columnists driving Priuses, golfing on foot, and eating at Chez Panisse.

Then unfortunately things began to take a sinister turn.

Inflatable wind turbine by Magenn Power.

Failed presidential candidate Al Gore, casting about for a new career, began dabbling in film production; his first release, a pseudo-documentary called "An Inconvenient Truth", came out in 2006. Suddenly, the whole issue of climate change became associated with radical leftists like Gore himself, marches and demonstrations, anarchist looting, and an enraged rabble. In other words it was turning into an unabashedly partisan movement, with no room for Republicans. If you were a person of a moderately conservative persuasion you didn't even like to say the words "global warming"—it felt like wearing white after Labor Day, or even noticing Labor Day, and as far as doing anything about global warming—well, as Gore himself might have said, fat chance.

And then Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential campaign, looking for some kind of justification for his plan to implement a socialist-style industrial planning system in our country, seized on the idea of green technology as the industry he wanted to plan. At rallies, he proclaimed he'd be able to create five million jobs in the field!* But whatever the virtues of clean energy may be, it just doesn't create jobs.** Obama dedicated $90 billion from the 2009 economic stimulus program to clean energy, but I don't know anybody who got a job out of it, so it must not have done much.***

Then again, it's an ill wind turbine that blows nobody good. Tax breaks and outright subsidies allowed the formation of a whole conspiracy's worth of green technology companies to line up at the government udder, and you'll never guess who one of the investors was: Al Gore. According to an article in the Washington Post by Carol Leonnig, he was worth less than $2 million at the time he lost the presidential race in 2000, but since then his portfolio has gained a lot more weight than he has: his assets are said to add up to better than $100 million today.

How much of that is corporate welfare from a favorably disposed Uncle Sam? Says Leonnig, 14 green tech firms Gore invested in have received or enjoyed the benefits of $2.5 billion in federal grants, loans, and tax breaks. Wealthy people are unhesitatingly taking advantage of this opportunity to make themselves even wealthier. Is that as suspicious-looking to you as it is to me?****

It's not as if return on an investment in green tech were guaranteed. Some companies subsidized by the U.S. government have done all right, others have flamed out like Krakatoa, destroying a whole world in their wake. And when a government investment goes awry, it leads to bad publicity, which brings the whole enterprise under suspicion.*****And these failures are taking place all over the world, China being the worst, throwing money at solar energy like Dutchmen after tulips, creating a gigantic and doomed clean energy bubble which is about to explode when it becomes clear that we can meet all our energy needs by extracting natural gas from the Catskills (how do you think they make the seltzer?).******

Overall, then, I am sad. Nobody's even talking about clean energy any more. Congress doesn't seem interested in my opinion, which is that we ought to raise the gas tax. Obama and Romney didn't discuss it at their recent debate, when a questioner wanted to know what they would do to lower the gas price. Obama seems fixated on this program of picking winners as if this were some kind of foreign country like France, except when I feel like saying he's ignoring the problem altogether. It's all his fault, and of course Gore's—why should I be feeling so bad about it? But I do—so much so that I'm going to end this essay with a dispirited little sentence that leads nowhere.

It's a story of people trying to do too much, doing it the wrong way, and making me sad.

*Specifically, he said auctioning carbon emission permits in a cap-and-trade system would generate $15 billion a year, and the government could invest that money in green technology to create five million jobs over a 10-year period. So we won't know whether he kept the promise until it's ten years since Congress passed the cap-and-trade legislation, which—oh, wait, they haven't passed it yet, have they?

**The European Union was up to 1.14 million clean energy jobs in 2010; of course the report didn't come out till 2012, so a European Politifact in 2010 wouldn't have been able to tell you.

***By the math of the Obama campaign, $90 billion, 60% of $150 billion, should create three million jobs over a six-year period. Again, we can't know, but the Council of Economic Advisors estimated that $80 billion from the stimulus had led to saving or creating 225,000 jobs in (part of) 2010 and predicted a total of 825,000 jobs by the end of 2012, which is actually pretty close to the mark on the way to 2015, about two thirds of where it should be. Amazing, especially when you remember the economic crisis—a huge proportion of the increase, for instance, was to come from people greening up their houses, which hasn't happened because people can't afford it. Big government-and-industry programs have done better: the wind tax credit alone, according to a new report, supports 75,000 jobs in wind energy.

****Uh, not really. I thought that was what they call "capitalism".

*****Three out of 33 companies subsidized by the green energy loan program have gone bankrupt, for a 90% success rate that would be the envy of most venture capitalists. As for the negative publicity—O thou living definition of "disingenuous"!—it consists of you and your friends telling lies about it: all you need to do is stop.

******Just not the case:

Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported [in August 2010] that global investment in clean energy surged to $57 billion in the second quarter of 2012, up 24 per cent from the first quarter and carried largely by a stunning 92 per cent spending increase out of China. Investment is still down year-over- year —2011 wasn’t a great year generally, right? —but it’s on the upswing in 2012, hardly the sign of collapse.

That boost from China is expected to continue, particularly in solar. As part of its 12th five-year economic plan, released in 2011, China originally expected to increase solar installations 20-fold by 2020. Last month it decided to draw forward that target to 2015, when it hopes to have 21 gigawatts of solar power capacity in place —enough to supply all of Ontario on a sunny spring day.

Why is China moving in this direction? Economically, it carries long-term strategic importance. But China’s citizens are also growing fed up with unbearable air, water and soil pollution, so much so that there is a rise in violent protests breaking out across the country.

The reason why clean energy isn’t a fad or a bursting bubble is that global problems such as climate change, pollution, poverty, food scarcity, crumbling legacy infrastructure, and access to clean water aren’t going away anytime soon. Renewable energy and other clean technologies may not be the only solution, but they are a big and growing part of it.

And even if there were enough oil and natural gas available to take care of our energy needs (with proven crude oil reserves of 22.3 billion barrels and a daily consumption going upwards of 20 million barrels per day we couldn't supply ourselves as much as three years), it would still be raising the global temperature.

Wind-powered street lamp, Netherlands, by Demakersvan.

...what I am trying to do, literally all the time, is to prove that saving the planet is better economics than burning it up. Not 10 or 20 or 50 years from now — [but] now. (Bill Clinton, ThinkProgress)