WASHINGTON – The Joe Wilson froth and frenzy was depressing last week: Lots of people calling other people liars. Lots of assumption that I’m right and if you see it a different way, that means you’re a deceitful, falsehood-pushing, dishonest scum bag. And maybe a racist.
Unsettling though the public discourse was, there was something far sadder than the shrillness of the liar-liar-pants-on-fire accusations.
The heartbreak of the week, it seems to me, was in 842 words on the New York Times op-ed page Wednesday. Thomas Friedman wrote of a California company that manufactures the machines that make solar panels. Applied Materials is a billion-dollar-plus company with 14 factories.
This should have been a happy report about how an American company is producing the equipment needed to generate U.S. energy from a renewable source (the sun) and that the U.S. energy policy was encouraging and profiting from the solar panel maker.
Instead, Friedman offered a tragic bit of news: None of those 14 factories is in the U.S.
The reason the production facilities are overseas is that’s where the customers are. We – we as individuals, our government – are simply not committed to developing energy that comes from something free, doesn’t pollute and doesn’t make us more beholden to countries that have their own best interests at heart, not ours.
Other countries have aggressive clean-tech policies that encourage the use of solar panels. The U.S. is neutral-to-discouraging.
What that leads to is this: Applied Materials’ factories make solar panels in places like China, Taiwan, Abu Dhabi. American business owners and homeowners who want to install solar panels have to use imported products.
“So, right now,” Friedman wrote, “our federal and state subsidies for installing solar systems are largely paying for the cost of importing solar panels made in China, by Chinese workers, using high-tech manufacturing equipment invented in America.”
Solar energy isn’t viable in many parts of the U.S. But we’re a big country; lots of places could easily fulfill a significant part of their energy needs from solar. Ditto wind.
With solar and wind contributing to the country’s energy grid, there would be less need for coal and imported oil. With less use of coal and oil, perhaps the regional fights over limiting the air pollution that both sources cause would be less fraught.
But our national energy policy makes it difficult for solar- and wind-generated energy to get a foothold. The protections the coal and oil industries get are not nearly as generous to the renewables. And then people whine that windmills make noise or look ugly in the landscape. Or, heaven forbid, create shadows.
Other countries get that coal and oil are not the basis for a strategic domestic energy policy. Americans are too busy arguing about how much power plant and exhaust pipe emissions are too much.
Friedman warned that is frighteningly shortsighted:
China, he wrote, “no longer believes it can pollute its way to prosperity because it would choke to death. That is the most important shift in the world in the last 18 months. China has decided that clean-tech is going to be the next great global industry and is now creating a massive domestic market for solar and wind, which will give it a great export platform.”
China’s cheap tires killed 5,000 U.S. tire manufacturing jobs. Members of Congress harrumphed; the International Trade Commission scolded; President Obama said tires imported from China would get a 35 percent tax.
Fine. But how much better for us all if we were to apply some of that clarity to renewable energy with national policies that encourage and solidify a U.S. market.
