Earth Day – a Good Time to Bury the Hatchet With Respect to Clean Energy

Each month, we read more about the battle heating up between the traditional energy industry (the providers of fossil fuels, power generation, transmission, and distribution) – versus renewable energy.  But aren’t they natural enemies?  Can anyone be too shocked that powerful forces try to beat up on their competition? 

Investor-owned utilities (IOUs), for example, are under pressure to make profits for shareholders, and solar energy represents a huge threat, as more customers leave the grid each month.  Any CEO of an IOU who doesn’t get what’s going on here and tries to “play nice” with solar is going to be looking for a job elsewhere.

Also at stake here is tribalism. Politics, certainly in the U.S., is so divisive that if one side likes something, the other side automatically dislikes it.  As ridiculous as it may sound, this is precisely the case with solar.  Liberals, of course, have been in love with solar forever because of its ecological benefits.  But now this is taking a bizarre twist, in particular, we have a case where solar not only can have a positive impact on the environment and human health, but also on things that conservatives care about too, e.g., national security, supporting the military, and cost reduction; solar’s already less expensive than grid-provided electricity in many parts of the country – and the costs continue to fall.

If fighting to suppress clean energy sounds as silly to you as it does to me, perhaps we can agree that Earth Day is a good time to calm down and find something of real meaning to fight about, like repealing Obamacare, opposing tougher gun laws, or finding the real truth about what happened in Benghazi.