Green Options

Editor’s Note: Today we are happy to bring to you a guest post from Sean Casten, CEO and President of Recycled Energy Development.

Americans have a habit of framing our scientific history as a series of Great Inventors, from Eli Whitney to Thomas Edison to Afrika Bambaataa. The history books say each was prodded by Adam Smith’s invisible hand to come up with the great technological advances that have made our country a home of innovation.

There’s a problem with this mythology: sometimes there’s no invisible hand. Sometimes short-sighted government regulations give preference to bad technologies over good ones — stifling innovation and blinding us to our own ability to make progress.

Nowhere is this mythology more evident than in our energy system, the most heavily regulated and subsidized industry in the country. A host of bad regulations have made this system grossly inefficient, contributing both to global warming and to high power costs.

On Wednesday I attended an event on Green Technology sponsored by the Midwest Council of the American Electronics Association. Vincent Albanese, SVP of Air Pollution Control at Fuel Tech, a company that produces air pollution control devices for large power generators and heavy industry, shared some startling information and insight:

• Congress is missing opportunities to save energy because of its narrow focus on achieving carbon-emission goals thirty years in the future.
• Older manufacturing companies have no incentive to clean up their plants because the EPA’s New Source Review rule requires that with any physical changes made, companies have to add all new technology.

New source review sounds good to us environmentalists, but in practice it makes rust belt companies avoid upgrades in their current operations that would save vast amounts of energy, because of the expense involved in completely revamping their entire operations.