How Congress Threatens to Undermine the Clean Energy Future: Sidelining Renewables

The new Greenpeace report Business as Usual describes "five maximum points of danger" in the House and Senate climate bills. SolveClimate is reposting each of those arguments over the course of the week.

Dear Mr. President,

What is especially dangerous, and frankly Orwellian, is that the American Clean Energy and Security Act and the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act both provide insufficient and grudging support to clean energy.

What state governments and private enterprise are doing to promote the adoption of clean energy already surpasses what the federal government is now proposing to do.

In other words, even the clean energy provisions of the bill support the status quo, the continuation of business as usual. It is farcical that both bills have the words “clean energy” in their titles. They should instead be encouraging the rapid development and deployment of clean energy — the way we once encouraged a first lunar landing.

President Obama, you told the UN General Assembly that the U.S. “will move forward with investments to transform our energy economy, while providing incentives to make clean energy the profitable kind of energy.” The climate bill undermines that aim.

A look at some raw numbers provides the most obvious evidence. Research and development for all clean energy technologies — solar, wind, geothermal, biomass and all others — will be supported with $47 billion worth of carbon credit allocations between now and 2030. That might work out to about $10 billion of support for each kind of clean energy — less than half a billion dollars a year — a paltry sum.

At the same time, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) provides more than $60 billion of support for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) development — a single technology that aims to make dirty coal clean. If the technology can be made economically viable — and that remains an open question — it would not be ready for deployment at scale for another 15 to 20 years.

On nuclear power, the House bill includes massive loan guarantees that will benefit nuclear power by reducing the cost to borrow money to build nuclear power plants, loans that Wall Street won’t touch. The draft Senate bill goes one step further, declaring nuclear a “clean” energy source, not unlike propaganda from the nuclear industry. Bowing to pressure from the pro-nuclear lobby, the bill states that “nuclear energy is the largest provider of clean, low-carbon, electricity.” All indications are that nuclear will be given more handouts and lifelines to garner votes for the Senate bill.

The imbalance in the levels of support for clean versus dirty energy is a glaring indication of where Congress is throwing its weight. One result of this imbalance is that the pace of clean energy deployment will decline over the next 15 years and the use of coal-fired electricity will increase over the same time period, if the pending legislation becomes law. It doesn’t sound like truly clean energy will become the profitable kind of energy anytime soon.

Over the last 10 years, Germany has actually figured out how to do what you wish to do in America. The Germans have used government policy to really support clean energy development so that renewable energy use, which in 2000 comprised 6.3% of total electricity supply, had risen to 14% in 2007. In just seven years, government policy had encouraged more than a doubling of the clean energy sector.

Germany created a new engine of development within its old industrial economy and that has meant 300,000 new jobs for its citizens. On a per capita basis, Germany now has eight times as many jobs in the wind and solar industry as the U.S. does. As a percentage of GDP, the clean energy sector in Germany is almost three times greater than in the U.S.