Clean energy policies are money wasted
Backstory
You don't expect to see this from the MSM and especially from the liberal Washington Post, nor from an economic advisor to presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter but:'The subsidies ostensibly address several issues — dependence on foreign oil, job creation, international economic competitiveness and environmental degradation — but without clear priorities, much less rigorous cost-benefit analysis. Unintended consequences and political influence abound.
The best-laid plans are vulnerable to unforeseen market developments — such as the boom in oil and natural gas “fracking” over the past decade, which Obama has now embraced.
To the extent that it’s coherent at all, the federal energy “portfolio” represents a return to industrial policy — governmental selection of economic winners — which was fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s, before it collapsed under the weight of its intellectual and practical contradictions.
As such, current clean-energy programs are no likelier to pay off than President Jimmy Carter’s Synthetic Fuels Corp., which blew $9 billion, or President George W. Bush’s $1.2 billion program for hydrogen vehicles.
This isn’t just my opinion or the finding of some right-wing think tank. Rather, all of the above comes from a new paper by three certifiably centrist Brookings Institution scholars, Adele Morris, Pietro S. Nivola and Charles L. Schultze; Schultze was a senior economic adviser to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter.'
There is even argument from Krugman that heya, you know it might be better to let other countries spend the money developing the technology, the upfront costs that are hard to recoup, and wait until the bugs are worked out before jumping into the deep end.
Read, think, maybe learn a bit but let's stop wasting taxpayer money on this and let the market work, which is what has helped make and keep the US the leader of the world.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-clean-energy-strategy-is-money-wasted/2012/06/18/gJQADIpLmV_story.html
by thepariah in Six Words for the Planet on Jun 19, 2012 | 
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