Colorado Energy Jobs Summit – Clean Ideas On Wasting More Taxpayer Dollars
A Colorado Energy Jobs Summit was held at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus Friday, Feb 19, 2010. The organizers included U.S. Senator Mark Udall, the University of Colorado, Third Way, and the Keystone Center. The highlight of the event was Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s speech to the Colorado politicians and interest groups. As the Denver Post reported, Secretary Chu said,
Failure to match other countries’ efforts in clean-energy development could mean the U.S. will swap a dependence on foreign oil for a dependence on foreign technology, he said.
“If we don’t start moving,” Chu said at a news conference after his speech, “other countries are moving, and they will look at us as a market.”
Translated, this statement means, if the U.S. Government doesn’t spend as much money as all the other countries in the world we may have to purchase clean technologies from them if they develop a technology that is carbon friendly and cheap (hurry, hide the kids, that would be awful.) However, as Secretary Chu must be aware, the Federal Government recently has given millions of dollars to foreign firms for renewable energy research as reported by the Investigative Reporting Workshop. Apparently, the buck doesn’t stop at Steven Chu’s desk at the Department of Energy.
Unfortunately, it is a near axiom that when government distributes money for any project or endeavor, the politically connected receive the funds. If Secretary Chu is seriously interested in winning the “clean-energy race” and not “falling irreversibly behind other countries” then maybe the Department of Energy could stop giving taxpayers wages to businesses in other countries.
Politicians from both sides of the aisle are guilty of initiating grants for “research” with albeit good intentions in some cases, but disastrous results in most. For instance, not long ago, the latest rage in renewable energy was corn-based ethanol production. Despite many scientists learning early on that corn based ethanol was more inefficient, consumed far more land resources than any other renewable alternative, and increased the cost of food production, the Federal Government, at the bequest of the corn lobby, gave an inordinate percentage of research dollars to ethanol rather than other more efficient technologies.
John A. Baden, Ph.D. of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment writes,
When evaluating ethanol mandates, responsible citizens ask: “What are the probable consequences of the policy, however well intended?” Surely, ethanol is not a pure Green elixir, but rather can be an intoxicating political potion.
As Mark Z. Jacobson, Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, at Stanford says,
The energy alternatives that are good are not the ones that people have been talking about the most. And some options that have been proposed are just downright awful,” Jacobson said. “Ethanol-based biofuels will actually cause more harm to human health, wildlife, water supply and land use than current fossil fuels.” He added that ethanol may also emit more global-warming pollutants than fossil fuels, according to the latest scientific studies.
If clean-energy research is indeed a “race” then Secretary Chu and the Department of Energy should consider removing grants to foreign companies and stop awarding them for inefficient research. Otherwise, Secretary Chu and the DOE will limp along wasting millions more in our hard earned wages. The question Secreatary Chu should be asking himself is what renewable energies are the private companies researching? You know, those crazy capitalistic companies that only invest in technologies that are efficient and profitable.
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That was a great post. I couldn’t agree more with your sentiments. Thanks for the effort.
With all the damage that we are doing to this earth I am not sure how much longer it will go forward, I think we should do more to help and stop consuming all its natural resources.