What Green Stimulus Plan?

The stimulus bill didn’t have much public policy coherence besides propping up the economy with government spending. This lack of focus is especially apparent in scatter-shot spending on “clean coal” and other green-energy plans. Spending is all over the place – and results aren’t guaranteed.

Two so-called “clean coal” projects were approved by the Department of Energy, both sponsored by big energy companies. $308 million in stimulus money is going to a BP – Rio Tinto joint venture to make hydrogen from coal, and sequester the carbon dioxide by-product underground. Another $100 million will go to a coal power plant in North Dakota, which says it will reduce emissions by 90%.

But “clean coal”  is not as harmless as it sounds. Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection is running ads against it. “Never was there an oxymoron more insidious or more dangerous,” writes one environmentalist.

Venture-capital investors hope that stimulus money will help their green tech start-ups, too. Some are hiring lawyers and preparing dummy applications to ensure they can jump in the front of the line.

Alternative energy research needs a big funding boost. But the fastest, most glamorous applicants may not be the best. These start-ups are driven by big investors, not necessarily by the best technologies.

Steve Coll, of The New Yorker, calls some of these grants “green crony capitalism.” Although he’s short on specifics, his broader point is that there is a lot of money flying off the presses to uncertain ends. Much of this research is speculative, which is good when researching new technologies. But unfortunately the bottom line is not so speculative: big businesses, including some big polluters, will make money off of the stimulus. Better planning, like a national energy plan, would have gone a long way to making the stimulus greener.