President Obama’s Clean Energy Speech: A Battered Albeit ‘Clean’ Economy
Nicolas Loris /
President Obama declared in the State of the Union address that the United States must be a leader in clean energy production. Why? “Because I’m convinced that the country that leads in clean energy is also going to be the country that leads in the global economy,” the president reiterated today in a speech at Savannah Technical College. That’s a good reason if it were guaranteed to be true, but doesn’t it depend on the cost? If a manufacturer in another country can produce these technologies more cheaply than a manufacturer in the United States, doesn’t that benefit both economies? President Obama went on to say,
“[W]e have the potential to create millions of jobs in this sector. These are jobs building more fuel-efficient cars and trucks to make us energy independent. These are jobs producing solar panels and erecting wind turbines. These are jobs designing and manufacturing and selling and installing more efficient building materials. ”
“We” meaning the government. This assumes, of course, that the money to build clean energy falls freely from the sky. But it doesn’t; the money is taken from other sectors of the economy where it could be put to more efficient use. So far, the green stimulus hasn’t produced the results initially purported when the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act became law.