FAIL: Obama will create alternative energy programs

Posted by Michael at 8/28/2008 9:30 AM
Categories: Domestic Issues, Policy Arguments, Not Convincing
The government can't create jack shit.(*) What it can do is get out of the freakin' way and let people profit from their own innovations. That means lifting the ban on offshore drilling, lifting the moratorium on nuclear power plants, refraining from passing draconian environmental policies with dubious long-term impacts, and refraining from using tax money to subsidize approaches that have no market viability. This sounds a helluva lot more like McCain's platform than Obama's.

And when it comes to me and how I personally am affected by this, the bottom line is this:
  • I'm not going to have a hydrogen car anytime in the next four to eight years, and neither are you.
  • My gas prices are going to continue to trend upwards, it's just a question of how quickly and who the money ends up going to.
  • My house will not be flooded away by rising oceans in four to eight years, and neither will anyone else's. And it's extremely unlikely that, if a century of CO2 emissions have fucked up the environment, that it will get any less fucked by anything the US does while India and China are industrializing.
So, in the end, the future of energy and the environment looks pretty much the same regardless of whether it's McCain or Obama in the White House. It's just that Obama wants me to suffer a little bit more in the short-term.


(*) The government's lack of creative capability is worth expounding upon. "What about the Manhattan Project? What about the Apollo Program? What about the Internet?" Yes, it's true, the government can drive military projects. Lest you forget, nuclear energy, space flight, and digital computer technology all come from mid-20th century American military programs.

The reason the government funds military programs is because the government, by definition, is the only one who can experience foreseeable benefit from such programs. The potential profitability of such programs is dubious at their inception. If it were otherwise, such projects would be run by private industry consortia, with each investor trying to pour in as much money as possible in order to get the biggest piece of the pie in the end.

In other words, the formula is always this: The government wants to build something that's useful for killing people and breaking things. The government, by definition, has the exclusive privilege to go around killing people and breaking things. Therefore, nobody but the government is willing to bother paying for the construction of such a thing. So the government spends massive amounts of money on it because nobody else has any incentive to do so. Sometimes, years or decades later, a clever industrialist figures out a way to make the government's creation do something other than kill people and break things, at which point it becomes an economically beneficial invention. Usually not.

This formula simply does not fit a project such as the creation of sustainable energy programs, which are economic in nature from the outset. A solar panel or hydrogen car is not useful for killing people or breaking things. It is useful for reducing consumption of resources, assuming it can be manufactured domestically and provided to the population for low individual cost. That means is has to be a profitable, economically viable consumer product. You want to build something like that, you don't ask the government. You go ask General Motors.
 
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