It is necessary for the government to play an incubator role until renewable energy takes off.
If you state with the assumption that we should move to alternate energy relatively quickly than your probably right. Absent that assumption there isn't much reason for it to be necessary.
If one industry was previously incubated by the government, that incubation is a sunk cost, its irrelevant to decisions going forward since it can't be undone (well you could intervene to damage or destroy the industry, but that doesn't recover the old costs, it adds new ones). Its not an issue of trying to create some sort of "fairness" between different industries. A free market response is to not intervene further, not to intervene in industry X, to try to balance previous intervention in industry Y. If we have infrastructure because of past intervention, and that infrastructure is profitable going forward even without additional intervention, than that infrastructure is a current economic resource, even if it was created by past intervention.
But for us to create a free market in energy, we have to roll back the subsidies and incentives for oil and coal and shift that to renewable energy in the short term.
Remove any ongoing subsidies? Sure, I'm there with you. But not try to counteract the past subsidies. Also alternatives are already subsidized to a greater extent than fossil fuels. |
