Let's Take a Lesson from Calvin Coolidge
Washington, D.C. -- As my previous post hinted, the mid-term election results have created a backlash against energy reform in the halls of Congress. But the rising tide of understanding that coal and oil are the fuels of the last century, not this one, is too strong to be held back for long by the ideology of a temporary congressional ascendancy. Yesterday morning, Third Way, a D.C. think tank, hosted a congressional briefing featuring senators Debbie Stabenow, Mark Udall, and Kay Hagan, to discuss how America can regain its competitive and manufacturing edge in the clean-energy sector.
Third Way's Matt Bennett began with an unusual appeal: "Let's take a lesson from Calvin Coolidge." It turns out that it was Coolidge, back in 1926, who created the federal subsidies for airmail that made the U.S. an aviation leader, a position it had rapidly lost since the end of World War I. And if a small-government advocate like "Silent Cal" could do it, Bennett implied, then perhaps today's Republican congressional leadership should reconsider its hostility to a partnership between government and business to create a clean-energy revolution here in the U.S.
Senator Stabenow put it clearly: "Our companies are competing with governments, not with companies." The chart on the dais, showing that China spends $114 billion annually on clean energy, the U.S. only $21 billion, made the point spectacularly. Most of the Chinese investment was governmental; most of the U.S. investment was private. Companies alone can't, and won't, compete with governments -- they will simply move to countries where the government will help them.
But that wasn't the only major clean-energy initiative yesterday. The Center for American Progress put out a new study, Cutting the Cost of Clean Energy, that called on the new Congress to respond to the three biggest problems facing the clean-energy sector in this country:
- Unpredictable demand in their respective markets
- A lack of certainty in both tax-code and policy incentives
- Unavailable long-term, low-cost capital
And Deutsche Bank unveiled an even more ambitious proposal that documented how a combination of natural gas, renewables, and nuclear could cut coal's share of U.S. electricity by more than 50 percent by 2030. Now the Sierra Club is confident we can actually beat that benchmark (and we doubt that nuclear makes sense as a larger part of our electricity mix), but the details in both of these plans are less important than their overall message.
The overwhelming consensus of informed opinion outside the Congress is that the U.S. is in a desperate race to retain its competitive edge and to restore its manufacturing sector. And when I see that Motor Trend magazine has named the Chevy Volt its Car of the Year, I'm comfortable betting that the irresistible force of technological innovation will sweep away the far-from-immovable object of a temporary congressional roadblock.
But will the new Congress have the sense not to stand in the way? Let's hope they dust off their bios of Calvin Coolidge.
