Slashdot Mirror
Obama Awards Nearly $2 Billion For Solar Power
crimeandpunishment writes "President Obama says it's time to heat up solar power, and he's willing to spend a big chunk of federal money to do it. Saturday the president announced the government is giving nearly $2 billion to companies that are building new solar plants in Arizona, Colorado, and Indiana. The president says this will create thousands of jobs and increase our use of renewable energy."
...or $906,250 per job!
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I would be more inclined to call neo-Keynesian welfare economic wisdom folksy in the sense that everyone is taught FDR took us out of the Great Depression with the New Deal and WW2 (which is just wrong - check out the depression that never was: 1920).
Regardless of the existence of jobs, any variation from what people actually want can be considered wasteful; private or public. You're right that jobs are important and in demand; but to just create them is to treat the symptoms rather than cure the cause.
Keynes himself said that all government spending turns into inflation and that any public spending, to be at all effective, *must* be unexpected.
What incentive? Sustainable income -- oil is both risky and a limited resource (right now much of the risk is socialized by the public, so of course they won't stop anytime soon). In fact, there has been a lot of research put into alternative energy by existing energy bigwigs. What incentive will remain after the 2 billion runs out? People are just going to jump on the solar energy bandwagon now that there's immediate cash being thrown at it.
It reminds me of my visit to the main Google campus, where every single building has solar panels on top. They did it not just because it sounds awesome, but because the government subsidized the cost with tens of millions of dollars. In the 30 year lifespan of the solar panels, they will come nowhere near paying back the cost of their production. This illustrates the fallacy of supporting alternative energy for its efficiency -- it's more inefficient and as such is currently a wasteful thing to put into production (what kind of energy was used in the production anyway?). The technology isn't there yet, which is why subsidization like this 2 billion is such an easy sell on the surface.
My point is that the money is going to be squandered by people who will put this public money to work for them. It's not even money being put toward independent research; it's money being put toward creating solar plants! The same solar plants that cost more to make than they return.
This 2 billion is corporate welfare -- the 2 billion goes toward building plants, and the owners of the plants will now be making themselves money at the expense of the public. Take into account the collusion of government and corporation; the same crowd sits at the head of both, and the same crowd is always helping itself.
note: That's why this is a bubble; no one would be building solar plants yet, because they don't return energy at a sustainable rate.