‘It’s not like
everybody doesn’t want clean energy, it’s that everybody doesn’t want to pay
twice as much to acquire the same energy.”
As we learned from the President’s oval office address, the
government’s focus is not on cleaning up the oil spill, but to politicize it
into passing a clean energy and climate bill.
Apparently, the President and liberal members of Congress believe that
if a clean energy bill had passed in 2009, the oil spill would have never happened
(but that is neither here nor there).
So, what does a clean energy bill look like? In order for clean energy to be the consumed
energy of choice, it needs to be affordable for all Americans and traditional
energy sources need to become expensive.
Clean energy becomes affordable through government subsidization. This is where the government pays energy
companies to invest in wind, solar, and now nuclear power. As we have seen in a previous
CSC article, the subsidizing of clean energy has its failures.
Who do you think pays for those energy subsidies that are
designed to make clean energy “cheaper?”
The other portion of the clean energy bill is to make
traditional energy sources more expensive.
How is this done? It’s done by
taxing the amount of emissions that the traditional energy sources create. This would not only include coal and oil
burning emissions, but the emissions created from consumer usage (like a car or
oil burning furnace).
What’s wrong with this idea?
No matter what the source of a consumer’s electricity is,
their utility bills will rise. This is
because all energy companies have some form of oil or coal burning electricity
division. Even if 100% of the
electricity you consume if generated from wind power, you will face utility
bills of easily twice what they were.
This is because the energy companies, who cannot convert to green energy
overnight, will have pass their cost increases (taxes) onto their consumers in
order to continue producing electricity for some profit.
The only winner in this debacle appears to be the
government. They will be able to take in
more revenue and blame the energy companies as their rationale. If government wanted to get greedy (or if
they really needed money), they could also increase the taxes on gasoline,
making it more expensive at the pump.
Even if they don’t go down this road, gasoline will become more
expensive because the emissions tax will also apply to refineries.
Finally, what I don’t seem to understand is how making
gasoline, the ownership of older cars, and utility bills more expensive is
going to help those who are struggling economically in this country.
So, how do we make green energy the popular energy? The answer is simple; by demanding it. If the consumer prefers to have green sources
of energy, and the utilities industry is deregulated to give consumers that
choice, utility companies will innovate ways to cheaply create and sell green
energy in order to improve profits. It’s
the same model that built the automobile industry and several other
technological innovations that have come since.
Innovation is created by consumer demand, not government mandate.
