Blotting Out the Sun

It was in 1791, while carrying on a torrid love affair with a blackmailer’s wife, that Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first Treasury Secretary, penned his classic “Report on Manufactures.” In it, the far-seeing father of U.S. capitalism laid out the case for a “free people . . . promot(ing) such manufactories as tend to render them independent.”

The U.S. has a long history of subsidizing industry. At the dawn of the republic, Hamilton saw the need to subsidize and protect an infant domestic textile industry against the overwhelming power of the British, whose looms then dominated the world.

I suspect that if Hamilton were around today, he’d probably join with the former intelligence chiefs who this week sent a letter to the Wall Street Journal protesting the wildly out of whack priorities of the Republican energy bill. The media, while focusing on the new Pope, has largely ignored the fact this legislation, thought dead a year ago, is once again moving through Congress on a wave of $2.35-per-gallon gas.

Of course, if Hamilton came back as a subsidy-dependent Houston oilman, he might argue as the White House is doing that opening up the Alaska Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling and spending billions more on tax credits and subsidies for the coal and nuclear industries are the wave of the future.

But these technologies will not promote U.S. energy independence. They will leave us even more dependent on foreign oil and environmentally unsustainable sources of power.

Given global warming, the still unresolved problem of storing nuclear waste and the fact that two-thirds of the world’s oil supply lies under Middle Eastern sands, the only way to wean ourselves from foreign oil is to wean ourselves from oil entirely.

That, unfortunately, isn’t on the table. There’s almost nothing in the new energy bill for sustainable energy supplies like solar, wind, geothermal and biomass fuels. Rep. Bill Thomas, Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, threw in a $18 million tax credit for solar installations. That’s right -- $18 million. That’s a rounding error in this pork barrel legislation.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration laid out its priorities last February in its Energy department request. Research into all forms of sustainable energy will get just $353 million next year, $32 million less than this year. That’s less than 20 percent of what Rep. Tom Delay of Texas was able to get done for his constituents alone. His ethics woes didn’t prevent him from inserting a $2 billion subsidy for off-shore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

This fiddling while oil burns is already having a major impact on our economy. Expensive gas is like a huge tax increase on the middle-class and working poor, who must cut back on other spending to pay the tab. But it’s the long-term impact on the economy that would most frighten someone like Hamilton.

If he were around today, he’s probably write a “Report on Energy.” In it, he would point out that the global supply of sustainable energy has increased 15-fold in the past decade and that our major trading rivals are making huge strides in these emerging technologies. Over that time period, the U.S. share of that infant industry fell from about 40 percent to barely above 10 percent. Virtually all the growth was in Japan, which now accounts for nearly half the world supply, and Europe, where wind energy has become a major way to avoid burning carbon-based fuels like coal, oil and natural gas.

Our future as a free people, he might argue, rests on our catching up.

Posted by gooznews at April 21, 2005 12:10 AM