Industry associations say the darndest things

      Don’t you just love it when someone says something to make an argument, and yet it backfires and convinces you of exactly the opposite?

      The gas and coal industries are up in arms about the Obama administration’s grants to ethanol, wind, and other clean energy research and trade groups to promote their clean energies (“Oil Allies Protesting U.S. Money for Rivals,” New York Times, Sept. 2, 2009).  It’s not fair!, they cry.  No one is giving us money to promote coal!  When was the last time the government gave money to advertise gasoline?  The government is biased!  It’s playing favorites!

      Well—yes.  But that’s precisely the point: the government wants to influence consumer behavior.  It wants people buying less gasoline and more ethanol, less coal and more wind.  The whole point of the program is to promote clean energies, and your energies are not, I’m afraid, clean.  So of course the government is being “biased.”  With every tax, every government stimulus program for clunkers or back-to-work training, it incentives certain behaviors (and of course as a direct result “penalizes” others).  That’s the goal.

      So please, until gasoline and coal are as clean as ethanol and wind, kindly quiet down over there.