Americans against American Innovation

As many commentators have noted over the years, issues around energy policy have been caught up in America’s culture wars, and the rise of solar energy has been the casualty. Conformity to the view that climate science is bunk, clean energy is ineffective, and coal is the only way to make electricity is enforced by intense social pressure. Right now, as Grist writer Dave Roberts put it, “Republicans who stray, who say anything accommodating, who even acknowledge that scientists might be on to something are savaged by the base and the conservative media complex.”

Sometimes this pressure spills over to contain the modest aspirations of liberals. Let’s look at President Obama and his response to the fate of the solar panels that Carter (a fellow Democrat) had installed on the White House and which Reagan took down. Just recently, a team of Swiss filmmakers found the modules while researching the history of Carter’s energy policy. In the great 2010 documentary A Road Not Taken, the film crew takes the modules to the Smithsonian Institute and then down to the Carter Center in Atlanta, where the modules are indeed accepted as museum curios—fulfilling Carter’s prophecy. Bill McKibben, the famous climate activist and founder of the group 350.org, took one of them to the White House in 2010 in support of the Globama campaign, to demand that they be reinstalled. His request was rejected.

The common sense that should prevail around clean energy is falling prey to America’s maddening politics. Why do you think so many influential media figures have changed their tune on energy policy? Look at Newt Gingrich, who in 2008 went from endorsing Al Gore’s view of climate change to adopting a “Drill, baby, drill; dig, baby, dig” line through his nonprofit American Solutions for Winning the Future. He took $825,000 from the coal giant Peabody Energy Corporation and $500,000 from Devon Energy, an oil and gas player.

The corrupting influence of money in politics is clear, but the good news is that average Americans from both parties understand this. Not a lot of Libertarian and Tea Party types in Iowa voted for Gingrich during his 2012 presidential bid, and it was because of this kind of “serial hypocrisy,” as Ron Paul put it. As I’ve said time and again, and I’m going to keep saying it: we need to urge our politicians to stop taking money from energy companies and their lobbies so that they can make honest decisions about where our power should come from.

In an ideal world, the choices we make about our electricity future should not be influenced by our political affiliations. Clean energy is neither Republican nor Democratic—it’s good for everyone. It’s not red or blue. (I personally like to think of it as orange, the true color of the sun.) It shouldn’t be right or left, but right up front. We have to rise above petty and partisan agendas.

Nasty politics from various quarters opposed to the success of clean energy and solar power doesn’t come solely from one group or another. Take, for example, labor union members who traditionally vote Democrat but may be more likely to oppose prosolar policies than those who belong to the ultraconservative Tea Party. While some union members realize there’s more work to be had in a distributed energy solution, many still count their livelihood on well-paying jobs in power stations. On the other hand, many conservative Americans look forward to the Solar Ascent because they know that the jobs it creates in the community—in sales, installation, maintenance, and a myriad of other areas—won’t be offshored and will be readily available to them. This creates true independence and gives us the liberty we deserve.

Yet, currently, the Republican Party composes the bulk of advocates for the fossil-fuel industry. This mostly comes from the professional political hacks around the party. Take, for example, Grover Norquist, lobbyist, conservative activist, and one of the strongest opponents of clean energy, who has focused his bullying sights on the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), one of the most effective positive energy policies in the United States. To Norquist the RPS is the new, skinny, but increasingly popular kid in town, and Norquist seriously wants to crush him before he grows up into a federal clean-energy standard or RPS equivalent being considered by Congress.

In an op-ed on the politically influential blog Politico.com, Norquist and a colleague regurgitated some oft-made claims of the fossil-fuel lobby: that clean-energy requirements in some states were costing jobs and money, that legislators would be wise to repeal laws that require some amount of clean energy in their electricity system to level the playing field (as though pitting nascent clean-energy technologies against the behemoths of the fossil-fuel industry would be a fair match), and that subsidies for the renewable-power industry are a waste. In the games surrounding energy policy, the latter is one of the greatest fudges of all—the idea that fossil-fuel businesses don’t receive subsidies while the clean-energy businesses do. We’ll dive into the details of the many and varied subsidies we provide for all manner of energy systems later, but for now suffice it to say that everybody in the industry gets some and King CONG gets the most.

In a rational conversation, we would be looking perhaps at a cost/benefit analysis and trying to calculate the value of solar energy versus, for example, coal-fired power to determine whether legislators should support mandates for renewable energy. Fortunately, many of our legislators have not listened to the likes of Norquist and are able to determine the facts for themselves, which show the benefits of clean energy, especially solar.

For example, in Colorado the RPS requirements to meet 20 percent of electricity needs by 2020 will be achieved eight years in advance, that is, in 2012, and will save customers $100 million in electricity costs while creating thousands of jobs and substantial tax benefits. On the other side of the ledger, coal costs more than it creates in value, according to a 2011 study in the American Economic Review, which estimates that in the United States coal creates roughly $53 billion in damages per year—a cost that is more than twice as high as the market price of the electricity. The estimate does not include “external effects such as those that take place through water, soils, noise, and other media” or carbon dioxide and its effect on climate. When the authors added in estimates of the cost of carbon dioxide pollution, they found the gross estimated damages caused by power plants to be more than 30 percent higher.

The bottom line is that putting partisan politics before American competitiveness in clean energy will cost more American jobs and lives in the years to come. That’s the real problem with all this politicization around Solyndra’s downfall. Americans are pioneers, which entails taking some risks. We make great entrepreneurs, and we should not delimit the arenas we work in to exclude the fastest-growing industry in the world. Investing in the energy technology that will power the world is a good risk to take (all entrepreneurs in every new field take these risks), but do note: in Solyndra’s case, its loan-guarantee program was set by the Bush administration, so the investment in the company (and by extension the industry) wasn’t an Obama or liberal interest, as some in the media would have you believe. Overall the clean-energy loan-guarantee program has had a higher than 90 percent success rate. That’s something of which both parties should be proud and should be doing more.