I’ve argued here and elsewhere that the noise surrounding “clean energy” may be overblown given the relatively small contribution renewable energy can make to total U.S. supplies in the coming couple of decades. Still, CORE is certainly of the opinion that progress needs to be made in renewable and clean energy technology development and that the U.S.needs to establish an energy policy that drives this process vigorously. Unfortunately, the U.S. government’s current efforts to accomplish this are delusional, timid and ineffectual.

By Graham Russell

This is nicely brought out in the current edition of Business Week’s item “America Sits Out the Race”, which laments the fact that the current energy legislation on the table excludes both a mechanism for limiting carbon emissions and a renewable energy standard (RES).

Read it for yourself here.

The most startling aspect of this item is the growing gap between the amount of clean energy investment taking place in the U.S.and that in China. In 2009, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, clean energy investment in China totaled nearly $35 billion compared to about $18 billion in the US. By Q2 of 2010, the gap had grown to the point where Chinese investment in clean energy reached $11.5 billion, more than the U.S.($4.9 billion) and European ($4.5 billion) investment combined.

A related item in the same edition of Business Week provides specific examples of job-creating cleantech ventures that have seen their future prospects dimmed or even switched
off by the failure of the government to get to grips with the energy
policy mess facing this country.

It seems amazing that the Senate - despite loud and ongoing pleas for action from such luminaries as GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins - continues to argue that the cost of putting a price on carbon and setting an RES is too great for the country to bear when the evidence of the opportunity being created elsewhere is staring it in the face.

What’s especially disingenuous about all this is that the Feds are, in fact, incurring enormous U.S.”costs” by providing tax credits, subsidies and outright grants to a miscellaneous grab bag of clean energy (and other cleantech) products, services and ventures, using money that comes out of our tax dollars. One assumes the Senate thinks this hard cash grows on trees!

If we’re going to have a government policy to encourage the development of clean energy, as Dave Gold of Access Venture Partners has suggested in his Green Gold newsletter, let  the nation have the government setting the standards and leveling the playing field so that the market will do the job of finding the best ways to accomplish the task. If we continue with the present (non-) policy, we’ll wake up in about ten years and find that the benefits of the “new energy economy” have happened…. in China!

FOOTNOTE: we’re often asked at CORE - rhetorically - why the U.S.should bother addressing the challenges of climate change and dwindling supplies of conventional energy when “those folks over in China” are ignoring the issues and polluting the world to death in the process. The recent evidence presented in Business Week (and elsewhere) is that China is very much alive to the dangers of the world’s current energy situation - and a lot more willing and able to get something done about it!

Graham Russell is Executive Director of CORE, based in Denver.