« Dad's groceries and the inevitability of death | Main | Call for creativity: communication systems and urban architecture »

April 30, 2008

“Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most”

Thanks to Bill Anderson for sending me a link to this rightfully angry piece by Thomas Friedman, who says that "we have no energy strategy."

If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.

Are you sitting down?

Few Americans know it, but for almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. The bickering has been so poisonous that when Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December. I am not making this up. At a time when we should be throwing everything into clean power innovation, we are squabbling over pennies.

jon posted this at 11:14 PM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend

 Subscribe to RSS feed for Weblogsky