President Bush and lawmakers of both parties are considering a wide variety of initiatives to attack the problem of global warming, from billions of dollars in new funding for clean-energy research to California-style national caps on emissions of greenhouse gases.
With so many possible strategies, policy makers need guidance about how best to advance the technologies that will reduce our dependence on oil and save humankind from environmental disaster.
TechNet, a bipartisan group of tech CEOs, offered up its best thinking on green technology policy Wednesday. While not every idea is brilliant or politically viable, TechNet’s “green technologies” agenda (available at www.technet.org) will help focus the debate on how Washington can best promote energy innovation.
TechNet argues that billions of dollars in new grants and tax incentives are needed for energy research, including a restructuring of current tax breaks that favor oil companies over alternative energy providers. With oil company profits at record levels, TechNet’s proposed redistribution of federal subsidies makes sense.
The group also wants the government to mandate more use of renewable energy by utilities and cap national carbon dioxide emissions. In both cases, TechNet advocates setting up a trading system to allow cleaner companies to sell excess emission credits to dirtier ones. Emissions trading has substantial support from Congress and key industries, and it must be part of any national energy plan.
TechNet is less persuasive when it advocates the creation of a National Institute of Energy, similar to the National Institutes of Health, to coordinate the nation’s energy initiatives. Creating a new government bureaucracy that duplicates the existing Department of Energy is hard to justify.
Regardless of the fate of individual recommendations, there is an important premise that the government should adopt as a guiding principle: technology neutrality.
The government shouldn’t pick winning technologies, but instead focus on the results it wants to achieve, such as energy efficiency, and then let the technology experts figure out how to deliver those results. A prime example is the huge federal subsidy for ethanol, a corn-based fuel that burns almost as much energy to create as it saves. Some of the ethanol funding would be better directed to research into technologies with more long-term potential.
The U.S. needs a coherent green technology policy, and TechNet is making a big contribution to the discussion.
