President Obama’s Taxpayer-Backed Green Energy Failures

[MachineGhost]

It is no secret that President Obama’s and green-energy supporters’ (from both parties) foray into venture capitalism has not gone well. But the extent of its failure has been largely ignored by the press. Sure, single instances garner attention as they happen, but they ignore past failures in order to make it seem like a rare case.

http://blog.heritage.org/2012/10/18/pre ... -failures/

[TripleB]

As much as I dislike our president, it's not his fault that a taxpayer-backed business failed. In fact, it's incredible if any taxpayer-backed business succeeds.

From HB's Why Government Doesn't Work: Consider what a taxpayer-backed initiative is—a businessman has an idea to do something. He writes up a business plan. He shows it to investors who have a business background and they think it's a stupid idea and don't back it. He shows it to banks and hedge funds and they also think it's a stupid idea and don't back it.

As a last resort, having failed to convince anyone to invest their money with him, the businessman turns to the government. The bureaucrat he speaks to is not investing his own money, thus the bureaucrat is less worried if the business fails because it's not his money and he's not personally accountable for it.

Thus, by default, any business that is backed by taxpayers is so risky that no private investors were willing to hand over their own money to put into it, and this means most tax-payer funded ventures are extremely likely to fail by virtue of the fact that if they were good, they wouldn't need government funding.

This is not a D or an R issue. This is government in general. All government funded ventures are significantly more likely to fail than privately-funded ventures simply because private investors perform greater due diligence.

Que the Liberals who will argue that just because something isn't profitable doesn't mean it's not "good" and worthwhile to society.

Followed by the Libertarian counter argument, "something is only worthwhile to people if people are willing to pay for it. Otherwise, people would rather spend their dollars elsewhere on something that is more worthwhile to them... which is the argument for smaller government, reduced taxation and let people spend their dollars as they please, not on a highly speculative venture that failed to convince private investors of its ability to succeed."

[Storm]

Here's an interesting one:

http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/ ... nload.html

I will admit that the EPA has been doing some strange things lately, the E15 (15% Ethanol) fuel thing comes to mind.  But, we should probably also remember that even the the EPA falls under the executive branch, Obama is probably not telling them how to run their day to day business.  I honestly don't think the president has much time to worry about things like that.

[RuralEngineer]

But, we should probably also remember that even the the EPA falls under the executive branch, Obama is probably not telling them how to run their day to day business. 

Not to derail the conversation, but how in the hell did such an overwhelmingly powerful organization come under the discretion of the executive branch?  The EPA may not receive day to day business instruction from the administration, but when Obama tells them to "bankrupt" the coal industry, they are fully capable of doing it.  My company is spending billions trying to meet EPA regulations.  Money that, while it does drive employment to a degree temporarily, doesn't add customer value and in fact hurts reliability.  It develops technology that is only mandated in North America and Europe.  The biggest developing markets have no use for it.  That money could be spent increasing market share in developing markets like India or China.

[Storm]

But, we should probably also remember that even the the EPA falls under the executive branch, Obama is probably not telling them how to run their day to day business. 

Not to derail the conversation, but how in the hell did such an overwhelmingly powerful organization come under the discretion of the executive branch?  The EPA may not receive day to day business instruction from the administration, but when Obama tells them to "bankrupt" the coal industry, they are fully capable of doing it.  My company is spending billions trying to meet EPA regulations.  Money that, while it does drive employment to a degree temporarily, doesn't add customer value and in fact hurts reliability.  It develops technology that is only mandated in North America and Europe.  The biggest developing markets have no use for it.  That money could be spent increasing market share in developing markets like India or China.

Have you ever been to India or China before?  Trust me, you would not want their pollution problems.  In large cities in China you can't even see the sun in the middle of a clear day because the smog and pollution is so bad.  It's like being in one of those crowded airport smoking booths breathing second hand smoke all day, every day.

I'll take onerous regulation and clean air any day over the smog soup they have to breath where they don't care about pollution.

That vague white circle in the distance is the sun:





From space:

[Benko]

Have you ever been to India or China before?  Trust me, you would not want their pollution problems.

So the only choices are

A. pollution like India/china or
B. let the obamacrats continue to add an infinite amount of regulations? 

Perhaps there are some choices in between.

[Storm]

Have you ever been to India or China before?  Trust me, you would not want their pollution problems.

So the only choices are

A. pollution like India/china or
B. let the obamacrats continue to add an infinite amount of regulations? 

Perhaps there are some choices in between.

Well, RE originally posited that his company doesn't have to deal with these pesky regulations if they were selling to India or China, and that North America and Europe are the only places that require them.

I would say, before we trash our environment like India and China do, perhaps we should consider the benefits we currently have from a mostly clean environment.  It wasn't that long ago that rivers in the US started on fire because of the toxic sludge running down them.  How quickly do we have to forget about the pollution and trash we've spent decades cleaning up since the EPA first started cracking down on it.

Before we throw out all regulations on the books, I'd like to see some damn good scientific evidence as to why they are no longer necessary.  The results speak for themselves.  Compare the air in any major US city to the air in the pictures above.

[RuralEngineer]

Storm,

If you don't understand EPA regulations, that's fine.  But pretending like every regulation coming from the EPA is necessary to keep us from living in a giant smog cloud is a load of crap.  The regulations are so tight that the exhaust coming out of new diesel engines is cleaner than the intake air in some locations, in THIS country.  The giant smog cloud seen in India and China comes from certain specific sources.  Mainly cars and industry as I understand it.  My company produces very large diesel engines used in a variety of applications.  However, whereas you have something like 300 million cars on the road in this country, there may only be a few thousand of these type of diesel engines.  The point isn't that the EPA regulations don't improve the air quality, they do.  The point is that they costs FAR out weight the gains, in this particular instance.  I'm not in the automotive industry, so I'm not sure where the breakdown is there, but for large diesel applications the Tier 3 emissions standard was plenty clean.  Tier 4 is a disaster.

[TripleB]

The point isn't that the EPA regulations don't improve the air quality, they do.  The point is that they costs FAR out weight the gains, in this particular instance.

I suppose on one end of the spectrum we could have 80% unemployment and the cleanest environment ever, or 2% unemployment, a growing economy and a little more pollution.

On one hand, pollution is going to negatively impact our grand children and great grandchildren.

On the other hand, increased regulations leading to a crappy economy result in government stimulus measures that increase the deficit and will negatively impact our grand children and great grandchildren.

So do you want to leave your great grand children a $200 Trillion Federal Deficit or a few parts-per-million of mercury in the rivers? Tradeoff time.

[Benko]

So do you want to leave your great grand children a $200 Trillion Federal Deficit or a few parts-per-million of mercury in the rivers? Tradeoff time.

Again, it is not a binary choice and there are points between those two extremes.


"The regulations are so tight that the exhaust coming out of new diesel engines is cleaner than the intake air in some locations, in THIS country.'
Exactly.  Overzealous regulations.

The road to hell is indeed paved with (what I'll assume are) good intentions.