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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
The price of oil daily hovers near all-time highs, and natural gas prices are near records, too. But Congress is still unable to pass an energy bill. Instead, it has passed a massive corporate tax cut, with billions of dollars worth of handouts to big oil. The bill did include tax credit for alternative fuel, but don't look too closely. Under the bill, the burning of farm-animal feces counts as an alternative fuel.
Still, a little cow dung in your alternative-energy tax credit is hardly the U.S.'s biggest embarrassment when it comes to energy policy. CO2 emissions are showing an unexpected jump, but the U.S. is still sitting on the global warming sidelines. In the specific domain of renewable energy research, the Bush administration is fixated on fossil fuel-based solutions, such as so-called "clean coal." When Bush looks to the future, he hypes hydrogen fuel-cell cars, but they likely won't be widely available for decades, if then.
The focus on hydrogen has stripped invaluable support from a nascent renewable industry sector.
"Hydrogen has basically sucked the money out of the renewable energy and efficiency budget in the Department of Energy. And it didn't have to be that way," says Marchant Wentworth, a legislative representative for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "They plunked down $35 to $40 million on hydrogen, and kept the overall [budget] number the same. Those cuts had to come from somewhere."
Dan Reicher, an energy advisor to the Kerry campaign, was assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy under Clinton, and now makes investments in renewable energy companies. He says that some of his former colleagues at the Department of Energy who are still there "are lamenting the cuts they've seen in most of the renewable energy technology [budget.] But the president is an oilman from Texas, and those are the folks who supported him, so it is not his priority."
As Romm and other clean-energy experts stress, this isn't just about saving the environment. By neglecting an industrial sector that will clearly be crucial during the rest of the 21st century, the U.S. is allowing other nations to grab a market that would help address one of the biggest domestic American economic priorities: jobs.
"As we continue to outsource everything but innovation, this is an area where we should be leading, not lagging," says Andrew Beebe, president of "Energy Innovations," a solar technology start-up in Pasadena, Calif. That's because the market around the world for clean energy technologies can only grow as the rest of the world -- if not the U.S. -- grapples with how to fight global warming.
In the absence of federal leadership in the U.S., some states have taken on the issue. Seventeen, including California and Texas, under then governor George W. Bush, have implemented renewable energy standards that aim for a percentage of the state's electricity mix to be derived from clean sources like wind or solar by a target date. For instance, in September 2004, New York state announced how it will work to get 25 percent of electricity sold to consumers from renewables by 2013.
But the U.S. still lacks a coherent federal policy. Presidential candidate John Kerry has pledged to derive 20 percent of electricity in the U.S. from renewables by 2020. But the Clinton administration couldn't even win support for a milder 5.5 percent by 2010 goal. And the Bush administration has subverted attempts by the Senate to enact such a standard.
"The Senate adopted it twice, but the Bush administration teamed up with the utilities to kill this renewable energy portfolio standard at the federal level," explains Dave Gardner of CERES, a coalition of investment funds, environmental and public policy groups.
