Sales of gas guzzeling Ford trucks up 17% Chevy Volt down 1.6%

[billvon 2,434]

>Do you honestly think that is what the subsidies do?

No, subsidies for efficient cars/appliances/systems just reduce our energy demand. Reducing our energy demand - THAT might prevent the next war.

[billvon 2,434]

>Every item you sited is directly connected to defense, an articulated responsibility of
>the federal government.

So is energy. (BTW "provide for the general welfare of the United States" is also an articulated responsibility of the federal government, and providing energy security definitely falls under that heading.)

>But that is a far cry from dumping a half a billion dollars down the pockets of Solyndra
>executives.

I'd much rather dump half a billion dollars down the pockets of Solyndra executives than spend 200 times that much killing people needlessly.

Here at my company we fund a lot of research. If 10% of all the research we fund ends up profitable, we consider it money well spent. The US government has a track record of about 93%.

[brenthutch 388]

"I'd much rather dump half a billion dollars down the pockets of Solyndra executives than spend 200 times that much killing people needlessly. "

How did doing the former prevent the latter? Apparently we did both.

[billvon 2,434]

>How did doing the former prevent the latter?

A reduced need for oil (more accurately a reduction in desperation for cheap oil) will do quite a bit to avoid future wars in the Middle East. Imagine how much we will care about the next Saudi Arabia/Yemen/Kuwait conflict if we don't need their oil. Would be very nice to be able to say "hey, guys, you work it out, let us know when you're done fighting."

[base698 1]

Getting half a billion dollars in Elon Musks hands is worth what ever crony capitalism took place. I personally would rather live in a country with rockets and affordable space travel where these loans are a multiplier effect for people like Elon Musk.

[brenthutch 388]

False premiss. Fracking, shale oil, and the recent liberalization of Mexico's oil production have made North America a net EXPORTER of energy.
That said, just how much did that half a billion to Solyndra reduce our need for mid-east oil?

[wmw999 2,148]

This year, we're a net exporter. Do you think that will continue, based on history of continuing population increase and development of energy-consuming stuff for us to buy?

Wendy P.

There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)

[billvon 2,434]

>False premiss. Fracking, shale oil, and the recent liberalization of Mexico's oil
>production have made North America a net EXPORTER of energy.

I said energy was important to the welfare of the US, and that the US Constitution gives Congress the power to provide for the general welfare of the US. Are you claiming that's a false "premiss?"

>That said, just how much did that half a billion to Solyndra reduce our need for mid-east oil?

The DOE Loan Guarantee Program as a whole? About 135 million barrels a year. The half billion to Solyndra? None.

[brenthutch 388]

billvon

I said energy was important to the welfare of the US, and that the US Constitution gives Congress the power to provide for the general welfare of the US. Are you claiming that's a false "premiss?"
.

No I am just suggesting that the several billion dollars wasted, (as predicted by me, (without equivocation by the way)), on "green energy" would have been better spent on developing our own natural resources.
Just think; if we had spent millions of dollars on roads (jobs) to gain access to oil and gas fields (jobs) and built pipelines (jobs) to transmit economical power to our factories (jobs) to improve our international competitiveness without a wage race to the bottom (good paying jobs), how much better off we would be.
You should familiarize yourself with the concept of opportunity costs.

(lost reading glasses, so I apologize for spelling, and grammar errors)

[brenthutch 388]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/01/10/fisker-automotive-bankruptcy/4413051/

How about Fisker?

[kelpdiver 2]

brenthutch

You should familiarize yourself with the concept of opportunity costs.

please educate us, since I can't think of any definition that applies here.

The oil resources are finite and nonrenewable, yet not going anywhere. There's no cost to deferring their extraction. However, there certainly is a cost to not developing alternative energy technology until after we run out of easy oil.

[brenthutch 388]

It works like this:
There is this thing called supply and demand. Restrict the supply in an environment of stable/increasing demand and costs will rise.

Obviously you don't get it so.... RING THE BELL! SCHOOL IS IN SESSION!

In the olden days, light was provided by campfire/fireplace, as technology progressed the camp fire was supplanted by beeswax candles and oil lamps. Olive oil and beeswax was replaced by whale oil, whale oil was replace by kerosene, which in turn was replaced by gas, which was ultimately replaced by electricity. No government R&D, no government grants, just the beautiful confluence of technology and markets.
As difficult to understand and as counterintuitive as it may be the most effective course of action is to do NOTHING.

[DanG 1]

You are obviously well versed in the subject. Were there really no government subsidies for running gas and electric lines?

- Dan G

[billvon 2,434]

>RING THE BELL! SCHOOL IS IN SESSION!

So far you're getting a C-.

>Olive oil and beeswax was replaced by whale oil, whale oil was replace by kerosene,
>which in turn was replaced by gas, which was ultimately replaced by electricity. No
>government R&D, no government grants, just the beautiful confluence of technology
>and markets.

Actually the reason most of the US got electricity was a federal program called the Rural Electrification Act. It was a program that did two things. First, it loaned money to companies to provide electricity to rural communities. It saw some abuses but resulted in most of the country getting electrical power. (Sounding familiar yet?)

Second, it created the Rural Electrification Administration. They helped set up modern utilities, and researched how to get power out to the boonies. They pioneered very high voltage (for the time) distribution lines, which made it economical to get power out to distant towns. The private utilities of the time didn't bother, and thus their service was unaffordable to rural communities.

Were they effective? Judge for yourself. The REA was passed in 1935. In 1934, less than 11% of US farms had electricity. By 1942, nearly 50% of US farms had electricity, and by 1952 almost all US farms had electricity.

Google is your friend - and may keep you out of detention.

[brenthutch 388]

In other words, the government facilitated the building of roads for the transport of an existing product. Hardly groundbreaking. Now go back to the back of the class where you clearly came from.

[kelpdiver 2]

brenthutch

It works like this:
There is this thing called supply and demand. Restrict the supply in an environment of stable/increasing demand and costs will rise.

Obviously you don't get it so.... RING THE BELL! SCHOOL IS IN SESSION!

I asked for a definition of opportunity cost and you give an answer on suppy/demand. That C- grade someone else offered is highly generous.

Quote

In the olden days, light was provided by campfire/fireplace, as technology progressed the camp fire was supplanted by beeswax candles and oil lamps. Olive oil and beeswax was replaced by whale oil, whale oil was replace by kerosene, which in turn was replaced by gas, which was ultimately replaced by electricity. No government R&D, no government grants, just the beautiful confluence of technology and markets.
As difficult to understand and as counterintuitive as it may be the most effective course of action is to do NOTHING.

Pearl Harbor was a consequence of this beautiful confluence you talk about. And half a century later, we're still having wars over it, so clearly technology and markets aren't solving the problem.

Hopefully this points out to you the obvious problem of sticking to a micro economical view taught at the freshman level. Reality is a bit more complex.

[brenthutch 388]

Quote

I asked for a definition of opportunity cost and you give an answer on supply/demand. That C- grade someone else offered is highly generous.

I mentioned opportunity cost, your retort was to claim that there was no cost associated with not developing our natural resources. A non sequitur. Instead of busting your balls and exposing your lapse in logic, I responded to your point of "it cost nothing to leave it in the ground". With the natural cost benefit analysis.
FYI, opportunity cost is "the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen". I.e. would we have been better off to invest a half a billion dollars on the education of our children, or spend a half a billion dollars on Solyndra. I am on the side of the children.

[billvon 2,434]

>In other words, the government facilitated the building of roads for the transport of
>an existing product. Hardly groundbreaking.

Funny. To hear you cry on and on about Solyndra, you'd think that by simply facilitating development of technology through backing of loans, the government was doing something horrible. Good to see you've changed your tune.

[brenthutch 388]

No crying here, just a clear eyed assessment. I like things that work (pickup trucks and oil), you like things that don't work (chevy volt and Solyndra).

[billvon 2,434]

> I like things that work (pickup trucks and oil), you like things that don't work
>(chevy volt and Solyndra).

The Chevy Volt works just fine I've driven one. So does solar. I get all my electricity from it. I now own an EV, and we do 80% of our driving with it. Much of the reason those are practical solutions come from the very programs you cry about.

In 30 years your kids (or their kids) will be buying cars, and odds are one of the cars they will buy will be a hybrid or a PHEV. Not because they will seek them out, but because that technology, with all its side benefits, will make its way into mainstream cars, and will just become part of the landscape. Again, due to those programs you cry about.

I assume you have electricity in your house. One of the reasons you have it - and one of the reasons that we have standardized on things like 120VAC 60Hz for appliance power - is, again, because of those programs you cry about.

But feel free to give up electrical power if you want to avoid using technology that comes from programs like the DOE's loan guarantee program. Feel free to give up Internet access so you won't have to use technology that people like Al Gore funded. Or you can keep crying, and use that government project known as Arpanet to make sure everyone hears you.

[brenthutch 388]

In thirty years, everybody will be driving EVs, supplied by fusion nuclear power. Can you imagine what a Tesla version 10.0 would be like? My point is that pushing nascent technologies into premature production, does more harm than good.

Interesting article that relates to this

http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2012/06/25/most-innovative-decade-in-history/2/

"I can go on and on and on, but the bottom line is that we are innovating at an unprecedented rate. In this and the next decade, we will begin to make energy and food abundant, inexpensively purify and sanitize water from any source, cure disease, and educate the world’s masses. The best part: it isn’t governments that will lead this charge; it will be the world’s entrepreneurs.

[normiss 622]

I'm VERY interested in seeing what Tesla does with the electric pickup truck.
Built to compete with the F-150 no less.

[billvon 2,434]

> My point is that pushing nascent technologies into premature production, does more
>harm than good.

You can't have a Telsa 10.0 without a Tesla 1.0. We wouldn't have been able to go to the Moon without the Redstone and Atlas based Mercury program, even if those were "premature." We wouldn't have today's Internet without Arpanet even though it was a lousy network at first.

>The best part: it isn’t governments that will lead this charge; it will be the world’s >entrepreneurs.

Agreed. Governments don't innovate. They just fund the innovation and create incentives that make that nnovation profitable.

The government didn't build the Lunar Lander; Grumman did. But the government provided the funding to make it possible.

The government didn't build wires to 90% of America; private electricity cooperatives did. But the government provided the loan guarantees and the administration to make it possible.

The government didn't design the Internet; Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor did. But they were funded by DARPA.

The government didn't create hybrids; car companies did. But government incentives made it financially possible for them to be sold.

A related story also from Forbes:

=================
Solyndra's Failure Is No Reason To Abandon Federal Energy Innovation Policy

By Jesse Jenkins, Devon Swezey, and Alex Trembath

Wednesday’s news that the California solar cell manufacturer and DOE loan guarantee recipient Solyndra will be declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy has government critics grumbling about clean tech boondoggles and failed government programs. But Solyndra’s failure, while unfortunate, is hardly an indictment of federal energy technology policy. Failure is to be expected with emerging, innovative companies, whether they are financed by the government or the private sector. The success of the Department of Energy’s Loan Guarantee Program (LGP) should thus be judged not by any one investment but by the performance of the entire portfolio.

Critics have seized on the news of Solyndra’s bankruptcy to condemn the Department of Energy’s Loan Guarantee Program, which provided a $535 million loan guarantee in 2009. The National Review’s Greg Pollowitz writes that Solyndra’s failure shows “why the government should not play venture capitalist.” Yet the fact is that, when judged by its entire diverse portfolio of investments, the LGP has performed remarkably well. Indeed, with a capitalization of just $4 billion, DOE has committed or closed $37.8 billion in loan guarantees for 36 innovative clean energy projects. The Solyndra case represents less than 2% of total loan commitments made by DOE, and will be easily covered by a capitalization of eight to ten times larger than any ultimate losses expected following the bankruptcy proceedings.

The broad success story of the LGP shows why federal investment in clean energy is necessary to help early-stage clean energy technologies achieve scale and reach commercialization. The inherent uncertainty in investing in novel technologies, coupled with the high capital costs and long time horizons, prohibits most venture capital funds from investing in large-scale clean energy projects. Financing tools and direct investment from the federal government can help bridge this well-known “Commercialization Valley of Death,” and the LGP is an effective way of doing that.

Instead of “picking winners and losers,” as the program’s critics allege, the program actually reduces risk for a suite of innovative clean energy technologies and allows venture capitalists and other private sector investors to invest in the best technology. Rather than picking winners, the LGP enables innovative companies to compete in the marketplace, allowing winners to emerge from competition. And while Solyndra is shutting its doors, companies like SunPower, First Solar, and Brightsource Energy, which also received loan guarantees and other support from the federal government, are industry leading success stories.
==========================

[brenthutch 388]

And we never would have had the Redstone rockets without its direct ancestor, the V-2. Does that mean that WWII was worth it because we got Tang?

[normiss 622]

Care to take even a remote guess at the amount of and sources of technology we scored from WWII?