"35 new wind turbine competitors from China, not one from US"

Thomas Friedman has been on an energy kick of late. His latest column illuminates some of the reasons why Denmark doesn't seem to worry about high gas prices. For one, half the Danes bike to work. That alone should do it. But it also has real implications on the employment side as well:

Because it was smart taxes and incentives that spurred Danish energy companies to innovate, Ditlev Engel, the president of Vestas — Denmark’s and the world’s biggest wind turbine company — told me that he simply can’t understand how the U.S. Congress could have just failed to extend the production tax credits for wind development in America.

Why should you care?

“We’ve had 35 new competitors coming out of China in the last 18 months,” said Engel, “and not one out of the U.S.”

In case you missed them, some of his latest columns were on the Jewish Henry Ford obsessed with making Israel the world’s leader in electric car and a 2-part series from Greenland on "learning to speak climate."

Comments

[Patrick (G)]

“The cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher to break our addiction to oil. We are going to introduce a new tax reform in the direction of even higher taxation on energy and the revenue generated on that will be used to cut taxes on personal income — so we will improve incentives to work and improve incentives to save energy and develop renewable energy.”

For all our bluster in the U.S. with regards to breaking our addiction to foreign oil; it's not politically feasible.

On the other hand, if we want break our addiction to the worst of the fossil fuels, it's not oil we should be targeting but coal.

[Person]

Wait, so would a Jewish Henry Ford hate himself? Or hate Gentiles?

Anyway, Congress shouldn't be picking winners, as it would be with subsidies to wind. Tell the market what the externality is for fossil fuels, slap the tax on, and let the market figure out what the best option is, given those constraints.

Saying that you know which energy source we should be "targeting" is like saying you know where stores should be located ... oh, wait.

[joshua corning]

Friedman's column may give readers the impression that Denmark's energy independence comes from wind when wind only provides 2.7% of their domestic energy production, but offshore oil and gas produces 97%. Denmark is an exporter of oil, gas and electricity.

[Dano]

Well, Vestas is going great guns on the northern Colo Front Range, lots of green collar jobs coming here. Oh, wait: it's not a Murrican company? Not really focused on in the papers.

Best,

D

[TokyoTom]

I'm with you, Person. A carbon tax would presumably bring us alot more wind, as well as nuclear and other power generation and distribution investments. We don't need the government to be pretending it knows how to pick the winners on the green technology front; it will only wind up picking our pockets.

Thanks for the interesting stats, Joshua. It sounds like Friedman has fallen for Pickens' charms as well as the Sierra Club.

But I do think that Friedman does have one good, though implicit, point - our failure to price carbon is giving everyone else a leg up on industries that we should be investing in.