I suppose this was inevitable:

In what one industry representative calls a struggle for supremacy, advocates of various sources of alternative energy are beginning to point out the competition’s warts.

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“Everyone wants to use the energy crisis as leverage to support his solution,” said Bob Rose, executive director of the Fuel Cell Council.

But with limited government research-and-development money available for ways to replace oil, any gain for one technology is a loss for the others. So the criticism is flying in all directions.

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I seriously hope we can keep this from devolving into a full-on circular firing squad of rent-seeking. There are two important points on which all these techno-boosters should be able to agree:

  1. Put a price on carbon! Selective gov’t subsidies and tax breaks are no substitute.
  2. Vastly enlarge the pool of resources available for R&D on carbon-reducing technologies, perhaps by drawing down present subsidies to fossil fuels and other atmosphere-destroying practices. There’s no reason these technologies, some combination of which are going to save our collective ass, should be fighting over scraps in a zero-sum game.