Business as usual

Didn’t anybody ever tell Mr. Wolfe that this is precisely the kind of threat to be delivered in person, at the corner table in the very back of the saloon, and even then sotto voce?

That way one can deny that one effectively said, “I’ve been bribing you because you’ve supported the state subsidies and protections of my business. If you threaten to reduce those subsidies and protections by even the tiniest increment, I will find someone more reliably subservient to me and finance his or her campaign against you.”

Make no mistake. That’s what Wolfe effectively said. His business is subsidized and protected by the state not via any actual appropriation of taxpayer money (though perhaps a search would find one) but because he is in the “renewable energy” dodge. Vermont subsidizes “renewable energy” (essentially wind and solar power) by requiring the state’s utilities to buy it (which requires everyone to pay for it) even though it costs more.

The specific benefits for Solar (Really, Mr. Wolfe. It’s the first letter that should be capitalized) are impossible to determine because specifically what Solar does is impossible to determine. Its website informs that it “provides turnkey engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) solar photovoltaic (PV) projects for developers, financial, commercial, government, utility, and other institutional clients.”

Whatever that means, the firm is in the solar energy business, protected and subsidized by both the state and federal governments. Wolfe apparently likes it that way.

Why shouldn’t he? Because the real lesson here is that his business isn’t all that different from the others, especially not the others in the energy sector. Among the weakest arguments of the anti-wind energy forces (wind being more contentious than solar in Vermont) is that the wind projects are economically viable only because governments protect and subsidize them.

That’s true of all energy. Oil prices were artificially inflated for years because the Texas Railroad Commission limited domestic production as the oil companies acted on their own to limit foreign production. Nuclear power is probably the most government-nurtured industry in the history of the universe. Coal companies do not pay the price for the pollution and illness their product creates. The taxpayers do. Or nobody does and people put up with dirtier air and more sickness, another kind of “payment.”

But in a broader sense, all businesses are subsidized and protected by government. Among the virtues of Wolfe’s letter is the absence of any pretence that ours is a “free market” economy in which the private sector does not depend on government. He was fighting the status which provides advantages to his segment of the economy. And he was refreshingly unapologetic about it.

He was also apoplectic about it, perhaps more than the facts warranted. First of all, the bill against which he was fulminating (S.30) is not at all likely to pass. If it does make it through the Senate, it faces substantial opposition in the House and a likely veto from Gov. Peter Shumlin.

Furthermore, it would hardly spell the end of solar and wind energy projects in Vermont. By making them subject to the criteria of Act 250 and giving municipalities a greater say over the permitting process, it might complicate or perhaps even scuttle a project here and there. The more likely impact, though, would be simply to make the permitting process more difficult for wind and solar developers.

That’s ample reason for them to be against it. But to threaten a legislative leader with well-financed opposition and to hint none too subtly that businesses would flee the state even if just one house passes the bill? That seems heavy-handed.