Is Green Energy a Waste of Our Money?

Article: Wall Street Journal, 'Green Jobs' vs. Real Energy Jobs, by Stephen Moore

The author of the above article is a member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, which will give you some idea of his politics.  I am embarrassed to say that I am largely in agreement with much of what he says.  In the near future I may have to blog about a couple of New York Times editorials and perhaps an Atlantic Monthly piece to wash the bad taste from my mouth.

Moore argues that the administration has spent large amounts of stimulus money on green energy projects that basically could never work, while putting roadblocks before technologies like fracking for natural gas which have the potential to generate decades worth of (relatively) clean energy to our country and are already providing jobs.

I understand that fossil fuels are dirty, bad for our planet and bad for our health.  But natural gas is much cleaner than coal, and fossil fuels obtained locally are vastly preferable to petroleum imported from countries like Saudi Arabia.  I remember when President Obama was campaigning, he talked about three long-term priorities: education, health-care, and energy independence.  We shouldn't forget this last priority, which would have saved us all manner of economic and political headaches over the last 50 years.

I agree with many of the arguments made by Matt Ridley in his book "The Rational Optimist", that fossil fuels have largely been the basis for the last 200 years of remarkable human progress, and , that throughout history "renewable" energy has been a synonym for human, animal or wood power, which is another way of saying poverty, misery and back-breaking subsistence farming.  Not to mention that with a world population approaching 7 billion, the environmental impact of the above would be far more devastating than any coal, oil or gas-fired future.

Now obviously the ideal of something like solar power is to generate oodles of clean, cheap energy.  The problem is, it has been a pipe dream for the last 50 year and has not yet panned out.  It is not viable.  Can it be in the future?  Maybe, but not yet.  So why should the government pay me to put an inefficient solar panel on my roof, the pre-tax cost of which is greater than the cost of the energy I save?  Isn't that just throwing our money away?

I am all for research and development, and certainly the government should be funding renewable energy research projects in our nation's great research universities.  But until green energy is economically viable, I wonder is it really a good basis for economic stimulus?

As far as fossil fuels go, I don't believe in tax breaks for oil companies, but neither do I believe in distorting markets by imposing things like fuel economy standards by fiat.  Let's tax fossil fuels so that their price will include the full cost of the damage they inflict on human health and the environment.  Then it will be in everyone's interest to use less, conserve, and find cleaner alternatives.  I have read that this is politically impossible, but that doesn't stop it from being the right way to use energy wisely.

In the meantime, why turn our backs on the stated long-term goal of energy independence when it may be realistically in sight?