It may well be that reasonable men can differ on some aspects of this situation. I do not contend that wind farms should not be built; only that there a certain places, such as mountain ridges which are migratory flyways, where they may do more harm than is warranted. Migrating birds and butterflies are the survivors of the nesting season and their long-term survival is important. That was not the main point of my article, however; it was that so-called “green energy” is not ecologically neutral. I am strongly in favor of “home-grown” energy, including drilling for oil in the east Gulf and off the Atlantic Coast and in that little piece of rock in the ANWR, any and all of which will provide more usable energy in the near and mid term than wind power projects, and also including the use of high-tech coal power generation plants which burn American coal and the use of natural gas - - we have lots of both. All the petroleum and coal and natural gas industries need to go forward is permission; they don’t need subsidies, as the corn ethanol and wind power projects do.
It is a myth that only alternatives or greens are subsidized. In fact the petroleum industry has been subsidized to the tune of trillions of dollars over the years.
All oil refineries and pipelines were built with large subsidies, earmarks, and tax breaks. Of course we spend billions to keep the sea lanes open for tankers and protect them from terrorist and pirate attacks.
Gas stations are often subsidized by local government when they are built, as are most commercial buildings in America.
These subsidies come in many forms, and are often more or less hidden from us taxpayers, such as, but by no means limited to; no or low interest loans, loans with no expectation of payback, earmarks, grants, tax breaks, free land, public employees working for private companies and a hundred other creative ways to support and enable private development. These subsidies are often buried in unrelated legislation or not even officially acknowledged or recognized, say a public works engineer or perhaps laborers on unofficial loan to a private construction project.
George Soros is getting a two billion dollar subsidy from the US for oil drilling in Brazil. Payback is unlikely, in my opinion, tho a big chunk will surely end up in Democratic election coffers.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203863204574346610120524166.html
Not all subsidies are government, many foundations, charities, and corporations subsidize economic development of every sort imaginable.
You can not get away from subsidies in America. It is politically popular among us conservatives to attack ethanol subsidies while we ignore and even deny petroleum subsidies.
We can not even ban public subsidies, earmarks, and tax breaks, as they are so deeply embedded in every level of government; national, state, county, city and township. With millions of pages of code to search, and every effort taken to conceal many of them, it is impossible to even roughly quantify them.