Obama’s clean energy boondoggle will be expensive for America
Shikha Dalmia
Reason Magazine
3/7/2011
President Barack Obama uttered not a peep about global warming in his State of Union this year. No dire warnings about climate apocalypse. No calls for cap-and-trade. Has this cold winter convinced him to put his global warming agenda on ice?
Hardly. Indeed, even in this age of deficits and debt, the president’s budget is chock full of global warming items—except he wraps them around a new cause: clean energy.
And that may be enough to get Republicans to sign on.
That “clean energy” is code for “anti-warming” is obvious, given that even Environmental Protection Agency numbers show that virtually all emissions have dropped dramatically in recent decades—except for greenhouse gases.
To cut those, Obama’s budget aims to hike Department of Energy spending by 12 percent from 2010 levels. He proposes $8 billion more for various clean-energy programs—on top of the $30 billion “invested” via the 2009 stimulus. Even that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
To pay for it all, Obama would stick it to Big Oil. He wants to eliminate $43 billion in oil-tax breaks over 10 years. That would be fine if he were aiming for a “level” energy market, with the government playing no favorites; in fact, he’s just looking to divert the subsidies to his favorites. (Even before Obama’s stimulus binge on renewables, total U.S. energy subsidies were close to $16.6 billion and about 30 percent—the largest share—went to renewables.)
Despite his talk of promoting nuclear power, the president’s budget cuts support for it by 0.6 percent from 2010 levels. The big winners are—surprise!—solar (88 percent rise), biomass and biorefinery (57 percent), geothermal (136 percent) and wind (61 percent).
The article continues at Reason.com
