By Glen Meakem
Published in The Pittsburgh Tribune Review
November 1, 2009

The Obama administration and liberal leaders are convinced that they can “re-architect” our energy industry into a “sustainable” system that relies on “renewable” energy.

But their plans require massive government intervention, subsidies and restrictions on individual freedom to make energy choices. If implemented, their plans would result in huge increases in energy costs for American families and businesses, causing massive job losses. Allowing the free market to determine our energy future is a far better path.

Let’s look at the facts.

President Obama last week announced that the federal government would spend $3.4 billion on a plan to “jump-start” America’s efforts to build a “smart” electricity grid. This grid would allow “clean” electricity generated in places with plenty of wind and sun to be transported to cities where it is needed to power homes and industry.

Expanding the use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar sounds great. But wind now supplies only 0.7 percent of our electricity and solar only 0.1 percent. More traditional sources — which together supply 90 percent of our electricity, including coal, natural gas and nuclear — are far cheaper.

Solar-generated electricity is three times as expensive as what users now pay. Wind-generated electricity is twice as expensive. Also, every megawatt of wind-generated electricity must be backed up 100 percent by traditional sources because wind is variable, causing dips and surges in the electric grid. Massive expansions of solar and wind power also would have their own negative environmental consequences.

Despite these facts, President Obama and other Democratic Party leaders are trying to ram a “green jobs” bill through Congress that would put huge restrictions on electricity generation from coal and natural gas and do nothing to enable nuclear. According to several different studies, this “cap-and-trade” bill would increase the average American family’s energy cost by $3,000 per year and eliminate a net total of 2 million to 4 million jobs.

President Obama himself has said that under his plan the cost of electricity “would necessarily skyrocket.”

Experience from Spain’s green energy initiative backs up these findings. Spain started implementing a carbon cap-and-trade system in 2000, including enormous subsidies for “alternative” energy. Nine years later, 2.2 jobs were destroyed for every “green” job created and only one in 10 of the “green” jobs were permanent.

Spain’s unemployment rate is now almost 20 percent and rising. Despite this pain, CO2 emissions still increased by 50 percent.

The economic pain of cap and trade might be worth it if we were buying huge environmental gains. But EPA Director Lisa Jackson has testified before Congress that this plan will do nothing to reduce the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Nothing.

All of the United Nations’ climate prediction models have been dead wrong for 10 years, since global average temperatures began to drop.

Let’s use some common sense — economic pain for no environmental gain makes no sense. Government intervention in energy markets is unaffordable, unsustainable and unnecessary.

Leaving energy to the free market is the smarter, more sustainable path. America’s 120 million economically motivated households always will make better decisions than the federal government.

For example, when gasoline prices spiked in 2008, consumption decreased dramatically in the United States. When government just stays out of the way, consumers make rational decisions and adapt to circumstances. Producers follow the market.

When fossil fuels eventually become too expensive because of reductions in supply, the free market will provide an abundance of alternatives faster and better than politicians and government bureaucrats could ever imagine.

Perhaps this starts to happen in five years, perhaps in 100 years. But it will happen when it makes economic sense as opposed to political sense.

One thing the fall of communism in the late 20th century proved is that attempting to defy economics leads to failed politics.

Free market energy is sustainable. Government intervention is not. And in the long run, free market energy will be “green” energy.