Facts about tax dollars and energy in the US

First off, Happy New Year!  Now, down to business.  The recent 60 Minutes segment on the Clean Tech industry has received an enormous negative backlash from seemingly every nook and cranny of the industry calling for everything from corrections to the reporting to out right reversal of most of the information reported.  Here are links to just a few of the protests:

ThinkProgress.org
CleanTechnica.org
HuffingtonPost.com
Grist.com
TheEnergyCollective.com
MediaMatters.org

Us here at OC Renewables had a similar feeling about the story.  It seemed incredibly one sided, showing how tax payer dollars went to companies and institutions trying to develop technology and products in clean tech, with some of them failing.  As anyone who plays in the world of new technology and new products should know, most new things will fail.  However, what 60 Minutes completely missed was that this failure is NOT A BAD THING.  Technologists and engineers know that failure is a valuable tool meant to weed the good ideas from the bad and push the development of new technology and ideas forward.  The only bad failure is prolonged failure.

But, the other shocking part of this story was the complete lack of balance.  It was never once mentioned how much tax payer money goes towards conventional sources of energy.  And, even more shocking, there was no mention of emissions from conventional energy vs clean energy.  Why on earth the staff at 60 Minutes thought they could get this one over the clean tech industry is 100% beyond me.

If you want to see some real facts on tax dollars in energy, check out the image below, and you can decide for yourself if tax payer dollars are being spent fairly with regards to energy in the US.