At one point during the speech, he was making some comments regarding government funded basic research. You had run out of the room for most of it, but caught the end of it and made a face of disgust. I don't personally see private organizations funding labs nearly as much as they did in the days of Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. I suppose that 3M, Honda, Google, and Siemens still have separate research labs. However, even with collaborations with universities, most of that research is tied to applications. I'm curious if you have an argument against the funding of national labs or even NSF grants.
What Ross is referring to is the following. I ran out of the room for a quick bathroom break, came back and asked what I missed. I was told that Obama claimed the only way we will ever have clean energy is through government funding. I think the line referred to was this one:
"It was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock – reminding us that Government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground."
I think the summary I was given was an exaggeration of what was said, but I think my reaction may still hold.
The government and Obama's administration in particular have been pushing more and more spending on clean energy. While I am for the expansion of clean or alternative energy sources (again, can we say nuclear?), the ways in which government has chosen to subsidize this goal has been both ineffective and may have actually hurt many paths for alternative sources of energy.
Investments the federal government has made in the past few years in solar and wind have an incredibly bad track record with several of those companies filing for bankruptcy and taking millions of federal dollars with them (forgive the over-using of Reason.com there; I can find more sources if anyone would like them). Yet, at the same time, Obama wants to take credit for the successes private natural oil and gas companies have eked out DESPITE incredible opposition from the federal government.
The technology that has made it possible for oil and gas companies to extract natural gas from shale rock is the vilified hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which uses pressurized liquid chemcials to break up rock and enable horizontal drilling into shale oil fields. This practice has been criticized for introducing possibly debilitating chemicals into the environment and into our drinking water.
How to manage this new technology may actually lead to very legitimate regulations as they create a serious problem of negative externalities. (I'm a libertarian, not an anarchist, so I do believe in government existing for a lot of very good reasons. However, when government expands far beyond these select reasons, I believe, is where it loses its moral and political legitimacy.)
Obama cannot have his cake and eat it, too. His actual investments and support of energy have generated little or failed all together, while the ones he has attempted to shut down or restrict have flourished. He wants to explain away the first while taking credit for the later, which I find disingenuous. Nothing I wouldn't expect in a SOTU address in an election year, naturally, but still something I'll grimace at.
As for general NSF grants and funding of national labs, I actually can find justifications for a lot of them, even in an libertarian context. However, the ways in which many grants are decided (Solyndra's lead investor was an Obama fundraiser, Feinstein's investment in Amyris, Gore's car company, and several dozen more are covered in this article) gives me a great deal of pause when it comes to the Loan Guarantee Program from the Departmetn of Energy. There are no "comprehensive performance goals" when evaluating applications, which leads to many bad investments, and opens itself to corrupt political influence. With $77 billion at stake, I think it's a good idea to be incredibly skeptical when any government official takes credit for their investments in alternative energy.
Thankfully, the NSF has largely avoided such corruption, and I do support many of their initiatives. However, as a libertarian, I do question the political validity of many of their grants, I would not advocate dismantling the program over a few bad grants. I like to take a reasoned and sane approach to the issue. :)
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