In case you were thinking I was too hard on Poor Ol' David Brooks today, let's pull back the curtain on the latest chapter in the longest intra-New York Times beat-down in modern history.
Mr. Brooks:
Personally I find this faith epistemologically naïve. Clinton seems to have no awareness that many of the programs she endorsed have been tried and did not work. The Obama administration spent mightily on green energy jobs programs and they did not work to significantly increase employment.Mr. Krugman responds, quite unfairly, with facts 'n shit:
*h/t "Unknown"Invisible Green Triumphs...Some things I’ve been reading lately remind me that there’s another major Obama initiative that is the subject of similar delusions: the promotion of green energy. Everyone on the right knows that the stimulus-linked efforts to promote solar and wind were a bust — Solyndra! Solyndra! Benghazi! — and in general they still seem to regard renewables as hippie-dippy stuff that will never go anywhere.So it comes as something of a shock when you look at the actual data, and discover that solar and wind energy consumption has tripled under Obama.True, it started from a low base, but green energy is no longer a marginal factor — and with solar panels experiencing Moore’s Law-type cost declines, we’re looking at a real transformation looking forward.You can argue about how much this transformation owes to federal policy. But only a combination of rigid preconceptions and sheer ignorance can explain the way right-wingers still go around sniggering about Obama’s green-energy promotion. Far from being a bust, that policy was at least a contributing factor to an energy revolution.
5 comments:
I guess one of the perils of posting as Unknown (what if that's actually my name? huh?) is being robbed of a h/t every once in a while. So it goes.
Gracias mr glass. I'm normally quite modest, really.
Takes a lot of energy to be so consistently wrong for money. It is to be admired.
Um, you can never, ever, ever ever ever ever be too hard on David Brooks. Just saying.
We can thank the Chinese for the Moore's Law kind of drops in solar power unit costs; they are the world's largest producer and consumer of PVCs. Obama's policies have facilitated this tripling in the US of solar power, including, indirectly EPA's regulation of carbon. Obama has also supported a robust DOE support for research and application of "green energy" (solar, wind, geothermal, etc.) even though much of it has been thwarted by the GOP whose only real agenda is the long-term destruction of the American economy for short grifting.
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