American Liberals Want More Green Energy Funding While Europe Quietly Moves To Develop Real Energy
According to some ‘Green Energy’ advocates, it really doesn’t matter how much of OUR tax money our government spends or how many projects fail its worth it.
The stimulus package has been one of the largest injections of government funds into green technology in U.S. history. But along with the benefits that tens of billions of dollars in funding brings — energy innovation, green jobs, the creation of green economy, and, in this case, the potential for reduced carbon emissions — there are also some very real and inevitable dangers.
That’s because high-risk startups, and even startups that originally don’t seem so risky, realistically have a small chance of surviving. So there will be a lot of public money that goes into failures. It’s just the nature of using government funding to boost innovation in a nascent industry. And now that much of the stimulus funds have been allocated, quite a few of these types of missteps are coming out of the woodwork.
Michigan has been pouring money into the bottomless green energy pit for years. All it has created is budget shortfalls and has not moved the unemployment rate.
If these ventures are so great and hold such promise why doesn’t the private sector invest in green energy? The truth is, they are money losers everywhere they are tried.
In Scotland, they created an elaborate (and expensive) green energy scheme that can’t reliably provide power to 87 people. China can’t make wind power pay for itself and in Germany, they spent $125 billion on a solar project that provides a meager 0.25% of their nations energy.
While Liberals in America are still fighting for the continuation of the head long charge into the green energy fiasco, many European countries are quietly developing real energy solutions that will protect and grow their economy.
Germany’s North-Rhine Westphalia state government last week said it had awarded exploration licenses to ExxonMobil and nine other firms including from Australia and Canada to search for the so-called unconventional gas.
Exploration technology for shale gas has improved dramatically in recent years, causing a gas glut in North America with knock-on effects for the global market.
As the hunt for new resources becomes cheaper and more promising, European countries such as Poland, Germany and, outside the EU, Ukraine, are embarking on shale gas searches.
Houssin said this made sense — while the U.S. imported less liquefied natural gas (LNG), leaving more for others, Europe was overcoming the recession, and Asia, notably China, had an insatiable hunger for energy.
“Gas demand has the potential to increase much quicker than supply, especially in China and India, and if the power sector is very much going to be based on gas (-fired generation), there may be a sharp increase in demand,” he said.
“Europe will have to compete with Asia for supply whether it is LNG or pipeline gas,” Houssin said. “In that context, if we had … important potential of unconventional gas in Europe, it would help diminish the pressure for imports.
Europe also wants to diversify away from key supplier Russia because of the chance of Russia rowing with transit country Ukraine over pipeline access and fees, as it did in the 2006 and 2009 winters, when this caused serious disruptions.
So remind me again why we should sink more tax payer money into failed green energy schemes.