Has there been a green tech bubble?

According to David Brooks of the New York Times, US and global investment in green energy has created a ’gigantic oversupply’ resulting in a green tech bubble, glorious in its potential about a decade ago, now poised to tragically burst.

How so? First, Brooks argues that renewable energy supporters in the US have created the greatest obstacle of all to renewable development by politicizing and polarizing the issue. This problem is compounded in his eyes when liberals try to equate green energy development with jobs creation, confounding the issues. Federal subsidies seem to have encouraged the unsustainable proliferation of startups eager to get a share and simultaneously raised concerns about ‘corporate welfare’ programs (during some of America’s greatest class struggles, no less). 

This rapid growth in American green energy development, and it seems here that Brooks means specifically the solar panel production industry, was matched by equal development around the globe (specifically, China), generating the so-called ‘gigantic oversupply’ that has created the potential for a green bubble. Brooks’ arguments about the political barriers to renewable energy development in the US that have been created by polarizing the issue might be spot on, but his conclusions about the green bubble seem narrowly focused on one aspect of the renewable energy sector and quite reactionary.

Brooks does raise the interesting issue of the race between renewables and fossil fuels development as a potential obstacle to their success, especially with natural gas development seeming to outpace renewables in terms of return on investment and low energy costs.

It may be, however, that this reflects an underlying American mentality about energy consumption that presents one of the most intractable obstacles to renewable development: the entitlement to cheap, reliable access to energy at a level of consumption that could not realistically be sustained worldwide. Combined with the American tendency to view the energy sector as a group of private businesses depending on profitability to continue service (only partially accurate due to government regulation and subsidies) , the idea that market forces constrain renewable development (that is, that renewables can never be profitable enough to justify sufficient development to meet American demand) creates a sort of circular argument that in fact might actually constrain their development by limiting the options we consider as a nation.