Paul Krugman- Obama's Invisible Green Triumphs [View all]

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Like a number of commentators, I’ve been struck by how people on the right know, just know, that Obamacare has been a dismal failure. More than 15 million Americans have gained coverage, costs are well below predictions, and employment growth has accelerated since the “job-killing” law went into effect — but they know none of that, because all they hear from their preferred information sources is tales of disaster.

Some things I’ve been reading lately remind me that there’s another major Obama initiative that is the subject of similar delusions: the promotion of green energy. Everyone on the right knows that the stimulus-linked efforts to promote solar and wind were a bust — Solyndra! Solyndra! Benghazi! — and in general they still seem to regard renewables as hippie-dippy stuff that will never go anywhere.

So it comes as something of a shock when you look at the actual data, and discover that solar and wind energy consumption has tripled under Obama.



True, it started from a low base, but green energy is no longer a marginal factor — and with solar panels experiencing Moore’s Law-type cost declines, we’re looking at a real transformation looking forward.

You can argue about how much this transformation owes to federal policy. But only a combination of rigid preconceptions and sheer ignorance can explain the way right-wingers still go around sniggering about Obama’s green-energy promotion. Far from being a bust, that policy was at least a contributing factor to an energy revolution.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/invisible-green-triumphs/?smid=re-share&_r=0