Intangibility

There are other less tangible means of subsidizing products and industries. For example, federal issuance of inexpensive or free leases for drilling for natural gas or crude oil on public lands and waters makes it cheaper for oil companies to roduce more of their end product. Allowing the flooding of vast watersheds makes it possible for utilities to use dams to provide hydro electricity. While the overnment incurs little or no monetary expense for allowing the use of public spaces, there are larger costs to the general citizenry—such as loss of land that is held on behalf of the public good and loss of habitat that is important to non-human species.

An example of a very intangible subsidy is the Price–Anderson Act, which limits the liability of nuclear power plant utilities in the event of an accident. The only way we will find out the cost of this subsidy is if a major U.S. nuclear accident ccurs, in which case the largest share of the burden (potentially hundreds of billions of dollars) will be shifted to taxpayers. Yet this very subsidy is crucial to keeping the industry alive, since nuclear utilities would not accept (and could not afford) the risk on their own.

The most important result of subsidies should be to give favor to a product or industry that needs a boost to break into a market, or to make a product more readily available. This assumes that availability is needed or desirable by society.
Green energy technologies that are promising or developing too slowly are ppropriate targets for subsidies. Given the right breaks, solar, wind, and alternative transportation industries can be boosted to help replace nonrenewable technologies, furthering the environmental and sociopolitical goals that are important to the public good, like reversing human-caused climate change and decreasing acid rain, and
eliminating wars over diminishing oil resources.

In theory, “mature” technologies, which have approached or achieved their pinnacle of development, don’t need the subsidies that newer technologies can benefit from. In fact, subsidizing those mature technologies can impede the advancement of desirable, immature technologies when the technologies are competing for the same market share. In the energy industry, subsidizing fossil fuel and nuclear technologies just makes it more difficult for renewable technologies to get the momentum they need.