I’ve got to give Randy Brock some credit for daring to attend the Renewable Energy Vermont conference. He knew he was going to face a hostile audience, and he delivered his free-market message. Didn’t sugarcoat his opposition to government support for renewables.

“I had an underlying question in my mind: Is it appropriate for government to pick industrial winners and losers in the renewable energy industry?” asked Brock.

…”Are we asking the taxpayer and the ratepayer to become investors in technology? What’s the ratepayer going to get in return? … Are they going to get any benefit? Folks weren’t able to answer that question, at least to my satisfaction,” said Brock.

Yes, Brock deserves some credit for a minor act of political bravery. On the issues, however, he couldn’t be wronger.  

First, there’s no such thing as an energy free market. Every form of energy benefits from some form of government assistance. Nuclear energy wouldn’t exist at all in a totally free market because the risks are too high. And the original development of “peaceful” nukes was heavily pushed and funded by the government. The free market wouldn’t have done that on its own.

And of course, even the profitable fossil-fuel industries get all sorts of tax benefits that tilt the free-market scales in their favor.

And just as the government played a decisive role in creating nuclear energy, it did the same for hydraulic fracturing, i.e. fracking. The Associated Press:

“The free market has worked its magic,” the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council, an industry group, claimed over the summer.

The boom happened “away from the greedy grasp of Washington,” the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank, wrote in an essay this year.

…But those who helped pioneer the technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, recall a different path. Over three decades, from the shale fields of Texas and Wyoming to the Marcellus in the Northeast, the federal government contributed more than $100 million in research to develop fracking, and billions more in tax breaks.

Now, those industry pioneers say their own effort shows that the government should back research into future sources of energy – for decades, if need be – to promote breakthroughs. For all its success now, many people in the oil and gas industry itself once thought shale gas was a waste of time.

“There’s no point in mincing words. Some people thought it was stupid,” said Dan Steward, a geologist who began working with the Texas natural gas firm Mitchell Energy in 1981.

Well, all right then. Whatever you might think of fracking — or nuclear power, for that matter — the point is proven. Government assistance for new technologies is an integral part of the way our economy works. Without it, a lot of the things we take for granted wouldn’t exist.

And given the environmental benefits of renewable energy development, we should at the very least give renewables the same public-sector benefit we’ve given to nuclear power and fracking.

Randy Brock: Brave But Wrong. Put that on a bumper sticker.