With new coal industry regulations proposed by 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.” This prompts 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 ubiquitous fuel’s economic value. They assure readers that clean solar and wind energies provides jobs for “2.7 million workers in the clean-tech sector.”
They don’t tell readers about the complete dependence of the “clean-tech sector” on government subsidies – read: U.S. taxpayers. The U.S. Energy Information Administration released a report that “renewable” energy — i.e., solar, wind, geothermal and biomass — provides only 4 percent of the nation’s electricity, but received approximately $14.5 billion from the federal government in 2010. Over $6 billion of that came from the 2009 stimulus package.
Coal, which even Bloomberg and Brune acknowledge provides 45 percent of America’s electricity, received $1.3 billion in subsidies during the same period.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance released a report explaining the importance of these green energy subsidies when complaining about their potential elimination in 2011:
In other words, “green” energy costs too much to survive without welfare plus regulations that target rival energy sectors. Given the harm to those other, more productive industries, green energy probably destroys at least as many jobs as it creates, and probably far more. It’s one thing to promote the environmental benefits of green energy, but quite another to make unsustainable claims about its economic value.
