The free market used to determine which technologies win. It seems Stephen Chu and President Obama are now in charge. From an item that ran today on the WSJ’s “Environmental Capital” blog this morning: the end of funding for hydrogen cars:
If hydrogen’s murky future is just a question of cost, as Dan Sperling of the University of California’s Institute of Transportation Studies pointed out, the government has an easy remedy to hand: Just channel the billions of dollars a year in biofuel subsidies toward a hydrogen-car infrastructure.
The Obama administration seems to be signaling that in this era of trillion-dollar budget deficits and urgency to change the energy mix, not all new technologies are equal. Some deserve funding and some don’t. In short, the federal government seems to be getting into the business of picking winners.
If past is prologue, that’s not a task the government is well-suited to. And it probably won’t sit well with the oil industry, which doesn’t want the federal government to begin throwing its weight around and backing particular energy sources. Consider the message in the Exxon Mobil ad that ran today on the front page of the Wall Street Journal this morning: “Oil, gas, biofuels, nuclear, wind, solar . . . to fuel the future we need them all.”