During Mitt Romney’s surprise visit last week to the East Bay, the Republican presidential nominee made it clear that renewable-energy subsidies will be at the center of his campaign. At the shuttered Solyndra solar plant in Fremont, Romney characterized public investment in green energy as an assault on free enterprise and an example of big government excess. The free market, Romney contends, doesn’t need help from Uncle Sam, and Solyndra was the number-one “failure” of President Barack Obama’s first term.
However, as much as Romney and the Republicans want to demonize public subsidies for green energy, the truth is, they still pale in comparison to the taxpayer giveaways for aging, polluting industries like fossil fuels and nuclear power. Indeed, even though Obama’s Energy Department made the wrong bet on Solyndra and it’s expensive solar technology, the amount of taxpayer subsidies for nuclear power and fossil fuels remains astronomically high. Currently, oil and gas companies receive at least $4 billion in direct annual subsidies from the US government — and that figure doesn’t include the hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent in the past two decades on foreign wars whose true intent is to protect our oil supply.
