This article made me wonder if those who repeat the conservative talking points against solar, wind, and other green energy sources know that they are getting themselves involved in a business competition. Coal, oil, and nuclear interests correctly see newer, greener power generating technologies as competition and they don't like competition.
As a nation, we need all of these resources, so maybe it makes sense to embrace them all and not try to extinguish one in favor of the other.
Yeah, I know it sounds like crazy talk again. 
Steamed's first link actually is a pretty good article in terms of considering the reality of the competition you talk about. It is a competition, and NOT just between businesses.
In terms of long term survival of the species within this biosphere, the answer is pretty straightforward. We have to move our power generation and use from an acyclic system to a cyclic system. The only two cycles we really have to choose form are the carbon cycle, or the hydrogen cycle. Anything other than that is simply buying time. Even when we DO do that, we need the energy input to cycle to be very asymetric to our use of energy. Which pretty much means the sun, insects, or microorganisms have to be doing a lot of the labor.
The hard part is making the leap, and one of the major things that concerns me about many of the "renewable" energy sources is that if you really consider climate change as a species ending event, what do you consider messing up the food chain or the fresh water supply? Wind and hydroelectric do that a lot.
Then you have a question of support. Are the backers and boosters of a given technology going to cut and run? Hydroelectric is going to come to a head with the same environmentalists that poo-poo nuclear. As wind kills off species of migratory birds, or at least cleanses certain regions of migratory birds, that's going to lose lots of backers too. Solar is going to run into strip mining issues. Almost EVERY form of energy generation is going to run into water issues as people try to pretend we have a water problem (we don't the earth is covered with mostly water, we have an energy problem in terms of making it usable by us).
If you look at the energy density of a facility, about the only non-hydrocarbon options out there are submersed tidal energy and nuclear. Home based solar is promising as a means of relieving pressure on the grid, and helps trade mining for solar resources for mining for wiring resources.
Also, and not without merit, is the notion that perhaps being pissed about Solyndria is not that it is solar, but that it was a MASSIVE investment in a small company that was KNOWN to be mismanaged by the administration before giving them a huge pile of money, and that despite the small size of the company, the massive influx of cash not only didn't create jobs, but didn't keep the company afloat.
I don't mind investment in domestic energy production honestly. I can tolerate that investment happening as kickback and pork along party lines. I can't abide my tax dollars being flushed away wholesale as a bribe to cronies. I don't care what your party affiliation is.
I like this kind of discussion because it takes some of the super heated politics out of it and lets us start talking about facts and realities.
Personally, I have always thought that we needed an energy bridge between the way we generate power now, mostly with fossil fuels and the way we will generate it in the future with nuclear fusion.
There are probably a lot of good ways to get from point A to point B, but the kickbacks and pork you point out are not among them. (Of course the much larger piece of the pork pie goes, and has always gone, to the fossil fuel side of the equation.)
I mean, really, why else would you have energy barons funding political movements that demand an end to regulations on the pollution caused by the use of fossil fuels?
As voters, we have to see beyond the "Taste Great/Less Filling" rivalries of the two parties and start to figure out how we are going to manage our future.
I mean, really, why else would you have energy barons funding political movements that demand an end to regulations on the pollution caused by the use of fossil fuels?
It's not about subsidies, although they like the free money. It's about growth. When you are dealing with an economy that is driven entirely by the expansion of the money supply like ours is at this point, the only way to be the richest guy on the block is to expand faster than everyone around you. You want to remove every restriction to maximum expansion. This of course just makes your problem worse next quarter.
I think the real point is that we don't have to pick sides. We need new energy sources and we need the ones that have been around a long time.
Were any of you youngsters around during the Arab Oil Embargo. Do you remember the lines of cars around the block waiting to get gas. And the rationing that took place. The effect of the embargo on the economy. Today we import a higher percent of oil than we did then. I don't like someones boot on my neck and that includes the oil companies. And I have enough sense to know there aint a gigantic pool of oil around waiting for us to find. So I am in favour of anything that decreases our dependency on foriegn oil including renewable energy.
Oh yeah, I was around then, although in the early 70's I was a starving student, too poor to be able to afford the $0.39 per gasoline since I was too poor to be able to afford a car.
I also remember the pollution of that time, and I realize that there are some in the energy industry who dream of that time as a golden era that they want to bring back.
I am against that.
steamed
I have been looking for a way to poo poo this article: From the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist: The myth of renewable energy
I did know that the Kennedys were big green supporters, especially alcohol fuel. But this Mr. Gramps Madville piece is the ticket. It's not that BO has promised to attack and bankrupt the coal industry, and the oil industry so that his financial supporters can get government grants to build build green energy companies and become the Carnegies and Rockefellers of a new energy era by using government connections to destroy the oil, coal, and nuclear competition, it's just the reverse: that coal and oil and nuclear have joined in a conspiracy to destroy the green industry. That is one beautiful way to phrase it. The attack method is beautiful, but still, I must insist, Buy Arab Oil.