Role of Government in Migrating to Clean Energy

I was delighted with the discussion pursuant to my piece on moral philosophy and energy policy. I note that most comments support my beliefs that a) young minds should be exposed to man’s great questions, b) we all do, in fact, share a set of duties and responsibilities, and c) the way in which we generate and consume energy figures prominently here, as the externalities of burning fossil fuels are causing a considerable number of harmful effects – both to us here on Earth now, and to future generations.

The discussion was by no means unanimous, however. Someone wrote in, taking a run at me for my position that government needs to play an important role.  I’ve lost the email, but as well as I can remember, it read:

“No, impressionable minds should NOT be exposed to your braying about the importance of big government.”

To clarify, I’d love to see all this stuff happen in the private sector. I ran a business for 30 years, once employing over 200 people, and I don’t need to be convinced that, when one is spending one’s own money, there is an efficiency that is absolutely unavailable in government. Businesspeople don’t build bloated bureaucracies; we minimize all forms of waste. In fact, I almost never had internal meetings, and when I did, they were laser-focused and as brief as I could possibly make them.

The problem is this: in the absence of government, we’ll be burning coal and oil until this planet is in ruins. The private sector has no incentive to go into clean energy at all. The returns are long-term, and the capital costs, which are huge, are all up-front. Worse, we have a negative tax on carbon. We continue to subsidize the oil companies at far greater levels than renewables. As self-destructive as this sounds, our government pays the oil and coal companies billions of dollars a year, rewarding their destructive practices and encouraging them to continue.

Our civilization needs a force that can make some huge changes here, in essence, creating a level playing field. What does that mean? It means understanding the full costs of everything we’re doing, and arranging a way to cover those costs. As long as the fossil fuel boys can pass along the increased costs associated with things like lung disease and long-term environmental damage to you, me, and our children, there is no way on Earth that clean energy will ever make an impact in our world.

If you know of a way to make this happen in the absence of government, I’m all ears.