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Boulevard of broken dreams?
As energy pipe dream after energy pipe dream goes down the drain, we’re left with large bills and nothing to show for them
In July 2008, Pickens came to Capitol Hill pushing a plan to use natural gas as a “bridge fuel’’ to meet America’s transportation needs until the plug-in electric car was competitive. He viewed the approach as a free-market solution; all he needed was a tiny bit of government support to get the whole thing moving.
“I will bet you a thousand dollars’’ he proclaimed during a briefing for Republican senators, “three years from now the price of oil will be $300 a barrel.’’ Three years seemed like a long time to wait to prove a point, but as the meeting broke up, I offered a dollar that the price wouldn’t hit $200 in the next two years. With oil trading around $125 that week, we settled on a year-end wager: He predicted $150, I took $100, whoever came closer would win the dollar. He even had a staffer write it down. Oil closed the year below $35 per barrel. Ouch.
The moral of this story is twofold: First, you can’t predict the future; and second, if you want to place a bet on the future, use your own money. Unfortunately, this lesson has been forgotten more times than anyone should care to count, and nowhere more so than in our government’s big bets on energy.
Fifteen years ago, Al Gore and Detroit’s automakers could see the future, and it was called the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV). They promised an 80-mile-per-gallon car. All they needed was 10 years and a couple of billion dollars.
When I offered an amendment to cut PNGV funding in 1998, John Dingell, the dean of Michigan’s congressional delegation, frantically worked against me, twisting arms in front of the speaker’s rostrum. My amendment passed by a whisper. Although most of the money was put back in the bill during conference with the Senate, I like to think it marked the beginning of the end.
In 2001, PNGV was finally zeroed out, having run through $1.6 billion in tax dollars with little to show for it. Worst of all, the concept cars that were built used high-compression diesel engines — because government bureaucrats and Detroit visionaries thought that was the future. Have you driven a high-compression diesel engine lately?
Not satisfied with eliminating someone else’s misguided energy subsidy, the Bush administration decided to come up with one or two of their own. By 2003, the hydrogen car was all the rage and part of the president’s State of the Union address. Again, pencil pushers at the Department of Energy joined forces with automakers and told politicians what they wanted to hear — this was the future. Today, after seven years and another $1.6 billion, hydrogen cars are no closer to commercialization than personalized jetpacks.
But perhaps no energy pipe dream has been as fanciful or as embarrassing as cellulosic ethanol — fuel produced from wood chips and switch-grass; and no energy of the future has been “just around the corner’’ for quite so long. In 2007, President Bush called for 100 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol production by 2010. Unfortunately, Congress took him seriously and promptly wrote it into law.
The poster child for this boondoggle was Range Fuels, founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Vinod Khosla. I visited with Khosla several times to hear him explain that this was the energy of the future, all it needed was a tiny government subsidy. He practically guaranteed that Range would be producing at $1.50 per gallon by 2008. Last month, Range shut down its Georgia plant after running through $160 million in taxpayer funding. Khosla can’t predict the future any better than Gore or Bush.
And now it’s President Obama’s turn. His budget promises $2 billion “to discover new ways to produce, use, and store energy’’ and the money will flow to more of the same. With the closing of Evergreen Solar , Massachusetts residents have seen the loss of almost $50 million in taxpayer subsidies up close. Bigger still, and destined for a harder fall, is FutureGen, a $1 billion effort to pioneer carbon sequestration. This monster science project will attempt to inject carbon dioxide gas deep underground — in the president’s home state of Illinois.
Every one of these subsidy schemes is based on the exact same premise: a bureaucrat in the Department of Energy, or senator on the Energy Committee, or policy staffer in the West Wing who can see the future of energy. Unfortunately, like Boone Pickens, they want to make a big bet on that vision with your money.
Ten years from now, I very much doubt that we’ll be driving cars with high-compression diesel engines, or powered by cellulosic ethanol, hydrogen, or electricity from carbon-free coal. But we will have wasted a lot of money betting on all of these dreams. A dollar doesn’t go far these days, but if it will help remind a few people that we’ve been down this road a few times before, I’d just as soon have Boone pay up.
John E. Sununu, a former US senator from New Hampshire, is a regular Globe contributor. 
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2011/02/21/boulevard_of_broken_dreams/?page=full
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