Wanted: A Level Playing Field for Efficiency Solutions and Renewable Energy
I’ve agreed that each of my posts appear on CleanTechies.com, as it simply represents an expanded audience. Here’s my recent piece on Germany’s PV subsidies, with a couple of sharp comments from Cleantechies’ readers.
To Edward Kerr, who wrote:
It’s become painfully obvious that business and government are not going to work together toward a clean energy future. As you note, we are consequently in the cue for an enormous amount of suffering. All because we lack imagination and allow the medium of exchange to rule our lives. Pathetic.
I respond:
Edward: Profound stuff, but the fact that our lives are, in fact, ruled by the medium of exchange isn’t going to change. It’s therefore incumbent on us to figure out how to make sustainability profitable. It’s a game that we must play– and win.
Of course, the real issue is politics, and the corruptive influence of money in the political scene. If it weren’t for this unfortunate aspect of our civilization, we’d have a fair and level playing field, in which all the producers and consumers of energy paid the comprehensive costs of their energy-related behavior. This would cause the cost of things like electricity from coal-fired power plants and access to oil made possible only via our $711 billion annual military budget to go right through the roof.
Try to imagine what would happen if fossil fuels didn’t enjoy BOTH the tens of billions of hard-dollar subsidies, AND the soft-dollars in forbearances that total at least a full order of magnitude more. Energy efficiency solutions and renewables would be seen as the deal of the century, and investors would be elbowing each other out of the way in a frantic effort to get there first.
We need government to fulfill its intended role as the arm of the whole People, for their protection and defense, and the arm by which We the People get together and do things for each other and for our children that private interests cannot or will not do.
We also need government to get out of the way, in terms of its expansive fossil entitlements and its continual defense and concealment of the externalization of fossil energy costs.
Ask yourself why our “public servants” are constantly and vociferously in the way of a level playing field. The overarching reason is that great mountain of fossil dollars and the threat of those dollars flowing instead to any potential political opponents (should their rhetorical grass seem oilier to oily donors).
All the elections in the nation last cycle cost something like $2 billion, and just ExxonMobil profited something like 40 times that number last year alone. If logic and sanity are going to have a chance in this game (the stakes of which could not be higher), we must stop the bribery.
Just as slavery was the old legal fiction that people are property, “corporate personhood” is the new legal fiction that property is a person. If money is Free Speech, then a few people and corporate objects of wealth will scream through bullhorns while the voice of the People is a smothered and gasping whisper.
At the beginning of the last century, the people of Italy and Germany didn’t have the advantage of knowing what their own history soon became, and those vital lessons that history can provide to our generation are increasingly obscured by the same kind of fiscal interests that wrestled against FDR when he charted a wiser path for America.
Benito Mussolini, a major proponent of fascism, defined it as follows, “Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.”
It not only ‘can happen here’ folks – it IS happening here.
In response to Craig’s reply I must say here that, Unless we try to occasionally attempt that Coasting or freewheeling or going without Engine Power (read here as Going without using Money Power); we lose a Golden chance to Experience and Prove, the First Law of Newton’s Laws of Motion which equally mean that One day we may end-up living without Money. …or needing very little. (You see we already made so many thing cashless! and Many more things in future may just work as Barter of our work or commitment to the Nature)