We need to get government OUT of control or manipulation over energy. The only role of government is to protect citizens from excessive pollution (excluding the CO2 global warming farce). Let the private sector invest and develop the technologies and let the most ECONOMICAL and CLEAN energy win. A job created by government taking of wealth does NOT create wealth…..it just destroys it.

Alex: I actually agree with most of this. The problem lies in extricating government fully — not just out of the clean energy side, but from the fossil fuel side as well, which, according to reports I find credible, receives 12 times the level of funding that renewables does. And it goes without saying that the nuclear energy industry couldn’t exist for 10 minutes without enormous government subsidies.  The U.S. nuclear industry has received $100 billion in government subsidies over the past half-century, and federal subsidies now worth up to $13 billion a plant. 

As I noted, this list of subsidies for fossil fuels takes many forms, some of them (deliberately?) hidden:

 Construction bonds at low interest rates or tax-free
 Research-and-development programs at low or no cost
 Assuming the legal risks of exploration and development in a company’s stead
 Below-cost loans with lenient repayment conditions
 Income tax breaks, especially featuring obscure provisions in tax laws designed to receive little congressional oversight when they expire
 Sales tax breaks – taxes on petroleum products are lower than average sales tax rates for other goods
 Giving money to international financial institutions (the U.S. has given tens of billions of dollars to the World Bank and U.S. Export-Import Bank to encourage oil production internationally, according to Friends of the Earth)
 The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve
 Construction and protection of the nation’s highway system
 Relaxing the amount of royalties to be paid – apparently, we get about 40% of revenues from oil on public land vs. 60% – 65% in most other countries
 Not forcing the industry to deal with the “externalities” – healthcare costs, long-term environmental damage, etc. — costs that are becoming increasingly clear and subject to quantification

From reading your past comments, I know that you don’t believe that there ARE any externalities about which to be concerned, but I trust you acknowledge the first ten on the list. I hope you’ll tell us what we can do to bring them to an end.

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“… The government we have is the government we deserve. Though you are correct per se from your point of view, I disagree with both counts to some extent. First, the Supreme Court’s job is to interpret the legality of laws written by Congress, etc.. It is now up to Congress to right the wrong of 100 plus years of corporate personhood. Now that an impotent attempt at campaign finance has been shot down, Congress should look deeper into who the constitution is written to protect: individuals from bullies/mobs. They won’t, though, as long as we keep giving more money to corporations every day than we keep for ourselves (savings) or give to the constitutional power (taxes).”

You always amaze me.  You’re 100% right that Congress could do something about this, but won’t — and for the exact reasons you’ve named.  That is why this is such a terrible conundrum — and the reason that I blog; without a grassroots effort to call attention to our broken poltical processes, we’re doomed.  

Dan continues:

Second: The dependence of renewable energy’s future upon federal government intervention shows that renewable energy proponents are not much different than the corporate power proponents: both are trying to make profits through coercion of the government Gun.

“We will be ready for renewable energy when people stop using so much nonrenewable energy. Not before. Until then, local control of rights-of-way is the only way to counteract corporate control of rights-of-way because the corporations own the federal government. When you advocate for federal decisions over local decisions, you are advocating for the biggest corporation to decide your future. You might as well just go to Little Rock and ask Wal-Mart to start selling power grids.”

Here I’m not so sure. 

First, I’m not asking Congress to help renewables — only to level the playing field.  Remove the subsidies, force everyone to pay the full price of the power they’re producing and consuming, and see what happens.  We’ll have renewable energy in about 10 minutes.  Btw, you often mention that you’d like to see less consumption of power overall; this action will achieve that goal in a big way.

Secondly, I point out a matter of political philosophy.  Though I felt different about this as a younger man, I’m currently convinced that we need to impute some moral goodness to government — and make sure that goodness happens.  Without it, we’re really dead — worse than dead, actually; we have a dystopia along the lines of 1984 or Brave New World.  But you’re certainly right in what you said above: we get the government we deserve.

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At first clance, this may appear a bit off topic. Why concern ourselves with the corruption from Big Pharma? Well, to me, it’s just another way of coming face to face with corporatocracy and the corruption it brings: how powerful and evil it is, and ultimately, how difficult it will be to eradicate.

Here we have the pharmaceutical industry paying off one or more representatives to insert favorable, protective language in a bill that has nothing to do with pharmaceuticals at all and — best of all — must be passed on an emergency basis and therefore cannot be reread in its final form before the vote that will pass it into law. Here is all the protection Big Pharma will need from their malfeasance in profiting from faulty, dangerous vaccinations, inserted at the last minute, in the middle of the night, immediately before congress approves the Homeland Security Act. Now millions of families with brain damaged kids will be denied the recourse to which they would have been entitled, because of the brazen criminality of the pharmaceutical industry.

I think the most common reaction to the video is anger. But when you’ve calmed down, ask yourself: what’s the magnitude of the task in front of us in cleaning this up? What will it take to rid ourselves of a system that has become so rotten, so brutally indifferent to the rules of fair play and decency, so cold in the face of the human suffering it leaves in its wake?  Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.

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