It took President Obama’s Press Secretary Jay Carney to shock me to my senses. As someone who favors cutting government spending on clean energy and eliminating government subsidies in general, I was particularly distressed to learn (in Carney’s words) that “I am “aggressively and deliberately ignorant of the world economy not to know and understand that clean energy technologies are going to play a huge role in the 21st century.” Even worse, I learn that “I have a severely diminished capacity to understand what drives economic growth in industrialized countries in this century.”
And I had thought that if clean energy technologies were going to dominate the 21st century, private enterprise would figure this out and develop them itself. In my ignorance, I thought that subsidies are dictated by and for special interests not by economic rationality. I also believed that Solyndra and SunPower were not aberrations but representative of what is going on in Secretary Chu’s and Obama’s energy department. What I fool I have been.
I fear there I may be many like me. I suggest the President go on television to explain to why we are better off with higher energy costs and lower standards of living so that wealthy green lobbyists fill his campaign coffers and ordinary people like me buy Volts and solar panels. Without Presidential direction on these things, we will be lost.
