Big Oil's Political Ploy

by William S. Becker

Whatever else we might say about Big Oil in the United States, we have to give the industry credit for one thing: It has mastered the art of scamming us with a perfectly straight face.

The scam has been underway for decades. This year’s example is the debate about repealing $21 billion in federal subsidies for big oil companies over the next decade. To their credit, President Obama and several Democrats in Congress are pushing the idea.

Oil executives have launched a counteroffensive reminiscent of Gordon Gekko’s argument that “greed is good”. Requiring taxpayers to subsidize America’s biggest oil companies is in the best interest of the country, they say, and anyone who disagrees is playing politics.

ExxonMobil, for example, has issued a statement that President Obama and congressional Democrats are engaging in “political theatre” on this issue. Perhaps. But the real plot line is that big oil companies are fighting once again to keep largesse they don’t need and the nation can’t afford.   Continued...

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'All of the Above' Is No Energy Policy

by William S. Becker

Even renewable energy hawks -- most of us anyway -- will concede that the United States cannot go cold turkey from oil tomorrow, or shut down all coal-fired power plants this week, or flip the off-switch tonight on nuclear power.

What we should not concede, however, is the need for the most aggressive possible push to get renewable energy on line. It should be our top national energy priority for many reasons, ranging from environmental protection to national security, and from economic vitality to social equity.

President Obama's recent "Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future" is as close as he's come so far to issuing a comprehensive national plan for the transition to clean energy. I credit the president for understanding that energy efficiency and renewable energy are a practical, vital and near-term part of our national energy mix.

Not everyone gets that, or admits it. In a recent example of cluelessness, USA Today published a vigorous defense of plastic grocery bags by Jonah Goldberg, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Goldberg panned the president for being "convinced that we can 'win the future' with such boondoggles as high-speed rail and impractical fads such as wind and solar energy (emphasis mine)." USA Today notes that Goldberg is a member of the newspaper's Board of Contributors, as though defending grocery bags and classifying renewable energy as a "fad" qualifies as a contribution to public discourse.

What's really impractical, of course, is the idea that America can compete and thrive in the 21st Century with the same finite dirty fuels that powered us the past 200 years. From childhood asthma to foreign wars, there are myriad reasons fossil energy industries should be, and inevitably will be, dead men walking. Continued...

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China and Germany race ahead of the U.S. in clean energy investments

by Jake Schmidt

Wind farm in Xinjiang, China

China invested $54.4 billion on clean energy in 2010, $20 billion more than the U.S.,according to the latest report from Pew Charitable Trusts and Bloomberg New Energy Finance released today. This is one-fifth of a global market that is growing at a record 30% pace. The competitive position of the U.S. has “deteriorated” so much that it slipped down to number three in private investment, as small-scale solar installations launched Germany into the number two spot. Pew and Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s take-away: policies matter as China and Germany had strong ones and US policies stagnated.

The report – Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race? 2010 edition – is the second annual compilation of clean energy investments (which includes renewables and energy efficiency).Last year’s report (pdf) made big waves when it announced that China had taken over the lead from the U.S. Now, the gap has widened and the US is falling even lower down the rankings. Continued...

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