Same Old Song and Dance: Obama Continues Bashing Oil While Offering No Viable Alternative

By Rob Janicki
President Obama has been out on the campaign trail bashing fossil fuels as energy sources of the past, while promoting "green", "clean" and "renewable" wind and solar as the energy sources now and for the future.  Obama paints a picture of alternative energy as the force that will give America a dominating competitive position in the world going forward into the future.  Obama also continues to decry some nebulous subsidies for the oil industry, while promoting subsidies for wind and solar energy projects.  It's a play on his "economic justice" jihad.  If Obama really wanted to level the playing field between fossil fuels and alternative energy sources, he would eliminate all subsidies for all forms of energy production.

Robert Bryce posits this very point that all energy subsidies should be eliminated for all energy providers for a fair head to head competition and then points out that wind and solar would immediately fail as viable energy sources.  Here are three pertinent points Bryce makes.

[...]  If President Obama wants to see subsidy abuse, he need only look at what happened with his own stimulus bill. Between 2009 and late 2011, $2.6 billion in tax-free grants went to just four companies, all of them board members of the American Wind Energy Association. The Spanish energy company Iberdrola got $1 billion in grants. German energy giant E.On: $542.5 million. NextEra got $618 million, and Terra-Gen received $467.9 million.  [...]

[...]  Let’s compare the taxpayer largesse for wind energy with the “unwarranted tax breaks for oil companies” that Obama wants to stop. In 2010, according to the Energy Information Administration, the total of all “energy specific subsidies and support” provided to the oil-and-gas sector totaled $2.84 billion. That’s a lot of money. But it’s not spread among four companies, it’s divided among the 14,000 oil and gas companies that are now operating in the U.S.  [...]

[...]  The “clean energy” subsidies championed by Obama resulted in a run on the Treasury but precious few jobs. Terra-Gen is building the Alta Wind project in California, which will create only about 50 permanent jobs. Based on the grants that Terra-Gen obtained for the Alta project, that works out to about $9 million per job. And we’ve already seen plenty of government-funded wreckage: Solyndra, Beacon Power, Range Fuels, Ener1.  [...]


With many European countries realizing the futility of wind and solar as viable energy sources, we are seeing these countries incrementally withdrawing from further wind and solar development, while giving up on some projects already in existence.  When socialist Europe realizes that wind and solar are losing propositions, you have to wonder how long Obama can push this alternative energy failure forward as a viable energy concept.