The Hill is reporting today that Senate Republican Conference Chairman Lamar Alexander said that the climate change bill currently being promoted by President Obama would “deliberately” kill American jobs.
According to the article Senator Alexander has an alternative program to the one being discussed:
“…Alexander said he accepts the science behind global-warming and the need for a climate-change bill, but emphasized the Republican approach is superior. As he has for several weeks, Alexander said the country should devote itself to building 100 more nuclear power plants over the next 20 years, converting half of the country’s autos to electricity in the next 20 years; increase offshore oil exploration and increase investments in energy research and development.”
Democrat Senator John Rockefeller is also opposed to the current bill. The current emission standards in the bill would devastate the coal industry in his state.
There is a related article in Newsweek this week about the negative effects of the amount of money being invested in green energy worldwide right now.
The Newsweek article points out:
“Energy economist Manuel Frondel of Germany’s RWI Institute says the country’s lavish subsidies have blocked innovation and delayed the advent of cost-competitive solar power worldwide. For several years solar-module costs stagnated because German subsidies sucked up global production at virtually any price. Only when Spain decided in 2008 to scrap a similar subsidy scheme it had copied from the Germans did the global solar bubble collapse and costs fall. The German solar case also defies the green-jobs model. The idea is that subsidies create a new industry and a lot of high-tech jobs. Yet Germany’s solar producers are downsizing. With little pressure to become efficient and cost–competitive, they are now getting crowded out by Chinese producers.”
Government is never a successful innovator and more government subsidies do not lead to economic growth. We need to use the energy we have in America as we let the marketplace freely determine our energy supplies of the future.