Want Solar to Succeed? Stop Funding Fossil Fuels

More than 90% of people surveyed want to see a pollution-free energy source flourish in America. Just about every politician, red and blue alike, at least ostensibly support solar power and other renewable resources. Even oil and gas companies are pushing green agendas and some, like BP, have become solar industry leaders. Yet there is a blatant hypocrisy that continues to tip the scales in favor of fossil fuels. That hypocrisy perpetuates solar’s losing battle for grid parity.

Between 2002 and 2008, fossil fuels received $72 billion in federal subsidies, with 98% of that going to conventional energy sources like coal and oil. During those same six years, solar power received less than $1 billion, a massive disparity that helped keep oil and gas prices artificially low and made it impossible for renewable energy sources to gain any real ground. Since Barack Obama took office, subsidies for renewables have mightily increased, but support for fossil fuels hasn’t decreased. As a result, we continue to prop up the pollutive energy sources we daily vow to do away with. We are mired in a one-step-forward-two-steps-back scenario.

Last September, a few months before the historic, if ultimately unproductive Copenhagen summit, the G20 group of nations openly discussed the subsidy contradiction. At that time, the world’s 20 largest economies agreed to phase out their collective $300 billion spent on fossil fuel subsidies. Yet, as Stacy Feldman points out in a SolveClimate blog, at the turn of the calendar year, neither the Obama administration nor Congress had done anything to set that phase-out in motion.

There are those that will argue that cutting subsidies for the backbone of our economy – fuel and electricity – would be a terrible mistake in a recession. To allow coal and oil prices to rise now would be a detriment. The obvious counter to that argument is that it’s a much worse detriment to continue stunting the growth of the renewable energy industry, the very solution to our economic woes as touted by government, industry leaders and activists the world over.

Beyond simple economics, we are playing with our very livelihoods here. It’s also widely agreed that changes in how we create and consume energy are needed now in order to curb disastrous changes in climate. Yet we continue on in limbo. We are in the middle of an open highway but won’t get off our stationary bike. Meanwhile, solar power provides less than 1% of our total energy consumption.

According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, solar energy could provide 15% of our energy consumption and 882,000 new green jobs by 2020 if Congress would just bring equality to energy subsidies. Already, the solar industry employs roughly 60,000 with the potential for hundreds of thousands more. The established and heavily subsidized yet waning coal industry currently employs 85,000.

Tell me, what reasons are there to continue to subsidize industries and resources long past their prime at the expense of a clean, healthy and prosperous future? If we want solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable resources to succeed, we must stop funding fossil fuels. And we must stop now.

Photo Credit: Greenpeace

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Posted on January 29th in Solar Politics by Dan.