The Most Common Motivation for Ending Renewable Energy Subsidies: Greed

In this piece I just wrote on economic incentives for wind, I suppose I should have pointed out this obvious fact: most of the people calling for an end to the subsidies for wind are, in one form or another, rooted in the vast profit structure of the fossil fuel industries.  The energy policy they support is not the fair-minded, market-driven approach I discussed, in which the externalities (damage to human health and the environment) are “priced in” to what we are paying for electricity from, for instance, coal-fired power plants.  In fact, it’s the opposite; in the main, they are bitterly refusing to deal with, or even acknowledge, the catastrophic effects of their operations. 

When we see, for example:

• The Ohio senator who wants to repeal the state’s RPS, who says “the choice of energy supply should come from the demands of the free market, and not from policy makers and environmental lobbyists,” or

• Kansas’ recent effort to weaken that state’s “20% renewables by 2020” law, led by ultra-conservative Grover Norquist, or

• The Heartland Institute’s outrageous efforts to discredit the concept of global climate change,

…do not think for a moment that any of these efforts are based on some sort of affection for free-market economics.  Rather, recognize that these folks are puppeteers of the fossil fuel industry, the most powerful group in the history of humankind, and one that hasn’t the faintest level of concern for the damage that the consumption of their product is having on your lungs or the quality of the environment on our home planet.