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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (246888)	3/8/2014 12:43:54 PM
From: T L Comiskey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542599

theres a lot here....dig in... follow the money................................ bearmarketnews.blogspot.com The Historical Role of Federal Subsidies in Shaping America's Energy Future." Pfund says a growing frustration on her part regarding the politics around subsidies motivated her study, which she believes is the first to quantify "how the current federal commitment of renewables compares to support for earlier energy transitions." At the conclusion of her study, Pfund says, "I was surprised at how much more support oil, gas, and nuclear received in their earlier days than renewables has received, because if you just read the popular press you'd think just the opposite. There is a lot of hue and cry about how renewables are being subsidized but when you actually look at the numbers it's a fraction of what oil and gas and nuclear received." Not to mention she adds, "these are gifts that keep on giving." Which leads to the question, why are we still subsidizing a 100-year-old industry, when the initial impetus for such action was to help launch these industries. Is there any doubt that they are now secure? A look at some of Pfund's numbers shows that the average for annual energy subsidies were as follows: (adjusted for inflation) oil and gas (1918-2009), $4.86 billion per year; nuclear (1947-1999), $3.50 billion per year; renewables (1994-2009), $0.37 billion per year. However, what's most noticeable is the federal support given to the different energy sectors during their infancies. Pfund writes: "There is a striking divergence in early federal incentives. For example, federal support for the nuclear industry overwhelms other subsidies as a percentage of federal budget, but equally striking is the support for oil and gas which was at least 25% higher than renewables, and in the most extreme years 10 times as great." Pfund found that "Every great expansion of the U.S. economy can be linked with the discovery of a new energy source." And today federal support for energy innovation is much lower than at the same correlating juncture in the development of timber, coal, oil, gas, and nuclear. Simply put, the playing field is not level. "Subsidies exist for all energy sources," Pfund says. "So when people talk about yanking the wind production tax credit or in 2016 the investment tax credit for solar, I hope that people will think twice about that. It doesn't have to be an ITC, but without some type of continuation of financial incentives until the costs come down to a point where they don't need them, you're going to create this boom and bust. You're going to draw dollars away from renewables right at the point when they're actually about to make a big dent on our energy profile."