With new coal industry regulations forthcoming from the Environmental Protection Agency, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Michael Brune of the Sierra Club campaign advocate “ending our [national] reliance on coal,” prompting Steve Miller of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity to warn that the environmentalist efforts to move the country “Beyond Coal” would leave the nation “beyond jobs, economic growth, energy security and global competitiveness.”
Bloomberg and Brune, of course, anticipate this kind of criticism in their column, which leads with claims about negative health effects of coal before trying to undercut the economic value of coal and assure readers that clean solar and wind energies provides jobs for “2.7 million workers in the clean-tech sector.”
But they don’t tell readers about the utter dependence of the “clean-tech sector” on government subsidies – read: U.S. taxpayers – for it’s money. The U.S. Energy Information Administration released a report that “renewable” energy received approximately $14.7 billion from the federal government in 2010, over $6 billion of which came from the 2009 stimulus package. Coal industries, by contrast, received $1.3 billion in subsidies during the same time.
Without these subsidies, a Bloomberg New Energy Finance report explained the importance of these subsidies when complaining about their potential elimination in 2011:
In other words, green energy costs too much to survive without government welfare in the form of subsidies paired regulations that target rival energy industries. And on this point, Bloomberg and Brune correctly note that green interests are not “trapped by Congressional inaction,” but not for the reasons they provide.
Green energy interests have an unfortunately effective proponents in EPA bureaucrats, who implements cap-and-trade style regulations that Congress refused to legislate.
The federal government should abandon entirely its efforts to pick winners and losers in the market, which means cancel subsidies for coal and green energy. Until then, environmentalists should stop claiming that their policies will “create jobs and expand our economy” when in fact green sector jobs amount to another form of government employment.
