Slate magazine offers dueling Tesla takes, with Scott Woolley claiming that the federal government should have hit the electric company up for some stock options back in 2009 when the U.S. Energy Department gifted Tesla with a $465 million low-cost loan. According to Woolley, Uncle Sam is acting Uncle Sucker. If we’re going to handing cash for high-risk Silicon Valley ventures, the winners like Tesla need to pay to cover the losses from the dogs like Solyndra.
Will Oremus, on the other hand, argues that we’re handing out cash to high-tech entrepreneurs not to make money, but to do good, which, of course, is a very different thing. And Scott is honest enough, in his last paragraph, to note that there’s just a touch of irony in all this:
The real problem is that Tesla’s cars today aren’t as green as you might think, because so much of the electricity they use comes from coal. Fixing that will require more clean-energy investments, not less.
The only problem with that is that “clean energy” tends to be disfunctional and expensive and unpopular (as in, not next to my vacation home, damn it!). What we really need is cheap energy. When energy is cheap—Fifties, Sixties, Eighties, Nineties, early Oughties—life is good. When energy is expensive—Seventies, late Oughties, early Teens—it’s not so good.
