Leadership

I’ve seen two major public policy initiatives in the past week that made me hopeful, at first, and then pessimistic, yet again.

First the good news. The United Kingdom is making a huge push in wind power. It’s planning to spend $200 billion over the next decade to install thousands of wind turbines all over the country and offshore, as part of a long-term goal to produce 15 percent of its power from renewable resources by 2020.

The U.K. government is under no illusions that this will be an easy, or inexpensive, fix, yet it’s still willing to move forward. Business secretary John Hutton said “it is absolutely imperative that we take as much carbon as possible out of the way we generate energy… There is a cost in going green, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But it will cost us if we don’t, because we have to factor in the climate change cost.”

That seem like real leadership, doing the right thing rather than the easy, or popular thing.

Now, for the reverse. Here in the U.S., the Bureau of Land Management is putting a freeze on all new solar energy projects.

The agency said it has received so many proposals to build solar projects on public land, more than 130 since 2005, that it has decided to stop accepting new proposals until it can conduct environmental impact reports on the ones already filed, which could take up to two years.

Solar companies have filed proposals for more than 130 projects on public land since 2005

Certainly it makes sense to be careful about installing large solar farms, but I find it hard to believe the agency couldn’t find enough people to fast-track these studies. Shutting down all development, at such a critical time for the alternative energy space, seems amazingly short-sighted. Which, I guess, is not such a huge surprise.