- October 25, 2011 • 3:00 pm PDT
- + comments
- See original
- prevnext
It’s become clear that the federal government doesn’t have the capability or the credibility to promote the growth of clean energy as quickly as people hoped three years ago. Cap-and-trade crashed and burned. The Deepwater Horizon blew up in our face (and the Gulf), but within months the government announced it would resume issuing permits to drill new deep-sea wells. The State Department is on the verge of authorizing a 1,700-mile pipeline, the Keystone XL, that will chug oil from the tar sands of western Canada to the refineries of Texas. Biblical weather events are happening all over the country, from the Mississippi floods to the Texas wildfires, yet a vocal minority of Americans still shouts down the reality of climate change.
In other words, it’s time to table the elegant, holistic arguments about how clean energy can help solve our climate, national security, and jobs problems in one fell swoop. Those arguments may be true, but they’re not getting us anywhere. Try this instead: If there’s a market for clean energy, then we’ll get clean energy. And there is a market for clean energy—that’s why wind and solar are growing so quickly. It’s still small, but it’s possible to goose it with small-scale interventions with the goal of making clean energy more attractive and make customers more attracted to it.
That was a recurrent theme at this month’s SXSWEco conference in Austin, a spinoff of the music/film/tech monster that descends each March. While national or international observers might see these tweaks and nudges as a stopgap strategy at best—an ugly alternative to federal policies that could promote the development of a diversified and sustainable energy portfolio—it’s an intuitive argument for Texans, who learned long ago that you don’t need progressive state leaders or a broad-based environmental coalition to sell renewable energy. You just need the numbers to make sense.
After the Solyndra bankruptcy and with next year’s elections keeping political leaders from major action, environmentalists are on the back foot, and developing local markets is worth considering. Here are three rules of thumb.
