Renewables will benefit from walking on their own

Green tax handouts were "so generous that there wasn't as much pressure to minimize costs," Atin Jain, an analyst at BloombergNEF, told The Wall Street Journal. Without the government money, companies will be forced to become more efficient.

Indeed, taxpayer largess can also stifle creativity and innovation. Like a sugar high, the handouts feel good but create problems over time. Wind and solar producers have been the recipients of federal and state money for decades in an effort to "encourage" growth. At some point, they have to be weaned from the public treasury.

In addition, "the removal of subsidies would bring more stability to an industry that has seen boom-and-bust cycles at the whims of Congress," Jinjoo Lee wrote for the Journal. He added that, "Ending a complicated form of subsidy might simplify renewable investments going forward — perhaps even opening them to more investors."

Critics of fossil fuels often argue that subsidies exist for all forms of energy development and that handouts to gas and oil producers exceed those bestowed upon renewables. That's a green myth.

In reality, "the claim that fossil fuels are heavily subsidized simply doesn't withstand scrutiny," notes a Cato Institute report issued in June. "While a few narrow subsidies exist and should be eliminated, the real outlier in the tax code isn't fossil fuel subsidies but the scale of preferential treatment granted to renewable energy technologies."

In fact, the review found, "official government data show that renewables are subsidized 30 times more than fossil fuels. Most of the subsidies are in the tax code, where 94 percent of the fiscal cost goes to green energy technologies. And even this breakdown is overstated. Most of what critics label as fossil fuel subsidies are standard tax treatments available to many industries."

The idea that renewables alone can power the American economy is nonsense given the current technology, green pipe dreams notwithstanding. The development of alternative energy sources hasn't displaced fossil fuels, it has only powered more energy use. And that trend will continue as power demand soars thanks to AI and other nascent technologies. That, Lee notes, presents opportunities for green energy producers.

Congress and Trump have done the green energy industry a favor by demanding that, after decades of taxpayer handouts, it learns to walk on its own.

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