Solar Is The Next Step?

While addressing the government's Solyndra misstep James Surowiecki defends clean energy investment:

The nuclear-power industry was effectively created by the government in the nineteen-fifties, and probably could not exist today without government guarantees. The coal industry was heavily subsidized during the nineteenth century. And the oil-and-gas industry has received tax breaks and allowances worth billions of dollars a year for more than half a century—to say nothing of the implicit, but incredibly costly, subsidy that oil producers have received in the form of the Fifth and Sixth Fleets. … Putting money into alternative energy is as close as we can get to levelling the playing field.