Susan McGinnis: Welcome back. As we continue our focus on clean energy, time now for The Mix as we look at whether the development of clean energy projects is one of the keys to boosting the economy. Joining me now is Aimee Christensen, an Enery Now contributor and founder of Christensen Global Strategies. She works with companies on climate change policies. Also, Ken Green, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. So welcome.

Aimee Christensen: Thank you.

Ken Green: Thank you.

Susan McGinnis: Glad to see you both again. Let's talk about this prospect of clean energy technology and development as an engine of economic growth. President Obama certainly believes that it is and here's a comment from him at his last State of the Union.

Barack Obama: Providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy and America must be that nation.

Susan McGinnis: Really? Ken, can clean energy really propel the economy and help lead the global economy?

Ken Green: No. And in fact, the experience with clean energy projects in Europe have shown that by and large, they lead to more job loss than job creation. They lead to great deals of corruption, rent seeking, and basically higher utility rates and higher electrical rates for customers and ratepayers, and industry migration out of the countries that have tried this.

Susan McGinnis: There is no doubt clean energy technologies are more expensive right now. Can they be a key to spurring growth?

Aimee Christensen: Absolutely, and not only are they key to spurring economic growth but they’re actually becoming increasingly cost competitive and that’s actually incorrect. The Spanish Department of Labor, and Spain has been a real leader on renewable energy, found that they have created 175,000 jobs in Spain from renewable energy. The European Union predicts that they will create 400,000 net jobs by 2020 in the EU from aggressive renewable energy policy.

Ken Green: If you look at both Italy and Spain, Germany and Denmark, the experiences with wind and the solar power have led to more expensive power and net losses of jobs.

Susan McGinnis: What about when the technologies become mature? Is it just a matter of waiting until then for it to become this engine of growth?

Aimee Christensen: The technologies already are here. They’re here, they’re mature and they’re starting to be much more competitive, especially in rural areas of this country.

Susan McGinnis: When you look at wind and solar, there’s still such a tiny -- they’ve been getting subsidies for years. There’s such a tiny fraction of our energy --

Aimee Christensen: What’s so exciting is that finally, those technologies have come into that price area where they are competitive with traditional technologies and that’s why wind was the number one source coming on that last year. We are the Saudi Arabia of wind. We should be growing these technologies.

Susan McGinnis: Are these sources already propelling the economy?

Ken Green: No, because they’re still heavily subsidized. If this technology is really competitive, you’d hear the Wind Association saying, “Don’t give me the tax credits and subsidies.”

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You’d hear the solar and the manufacturers say, “We don’t need stimulus money. We don’t need tax breaks. We don’t need feed-in -- guaranteed prices for feed-in or wind or solar power.” You’d be happy that they’d be saying, “Let’s get rid of all the subsidies because we want to compete and we’re going to beat the heck out of coal and natural gas and other forms of electricity production,” and that’s not what they’re saying.

Susan McGinnis: Let me get a perspective of someone who actually advises on investments in clean energy production. Mark Fulton is joining us now. He’s the Global Head of Climate Change Investment Research at Deutsche Bank. He tracks and advises clients on clean energy investments. And Mark, thanks for being with us. Do you think that clean energies are able to draw investments if they’re not subsidized?

Mark Fulton: I think at the moment, it depends which type of clean energies we’re talking about. And I’d actually like to widen the discussion a bit to talk about cleaner energy. And in particular, I want to bring in natural gas. Natural gas has a much cleaner footprint than coal, it has 60% less carbon footprint. It doesn’t create hazardous air pollutants that are damaging to health and so on. Those -- at the moment, gas is extremely competitive against coal.

Susan McGinnis: Where are you advising your clients to invest in different areas of clean and cleaner energy? Where is the smart money going?

Mark Fulton: Well, to tell you the truth, we’re a global unit, so we just don’t look at America. So one of the key questions is, which countries should you invest in? So we’re looking for countries that do indeed want to support the clean energy push in a fair and equitable way. And therefore, we look around the world and we see the opportunities in Europe and particularly many of us are looking to China where China is now emerging in leadership. It’s the largest clean energy markets in the world. And so, people are very interested there.

In the United States, I think there are many opportunities but we are very focused on the potential for natural gas in the United States and we’re already seeing a switch from coal to gas. And we think that this is something that will continue over the next 10 to 20 years.

Susan McGinnis: So where does that leave us as far as subsidies? Should there be subsidies across all forms of energy, the traditional energies then a cleaner and clean energy?

Ken Green: What we need is to get all the subsidies out so that we can figure out which of these forms of energy really is the best because with the market so distorted, it’s almost impossible to put a real price per kilowatt hour of nuclear power.

Susan McGinnis: Aimee, why shouldn’t wind and solar and the cleaner energies have to compete with the traditionals with no subsidies?

Aimee Christensen: We have decades of subsidies supporting the traditional and the legacy interest in this sector --

Susan McGinnis: And what if they all are gone?

Aimee Christensen: And so if they all are gone, what you’re missing is that early startup phase of supporting these new technologies as they’re commercializing, as they’re coming to market and this is where the world is going. It’s going to competing globally and that’s what you heard from -- excuse me a moment -- that’s what you heard from Mark Fulton. You have global investors looking where they’re putting their billions of dollars. They’re not bringing it to United States and clean energy, and this is a global sector. They’re going to China, they’re going to Denmark, they’re going to Spain and that’s where the jobs are being created.

GE -- you talked about government studies. GE did a study and they showed that the investments the United States has made in wind were far exceeded by the benefits created so the investments return. These are subsidies that return on investment and they return on job trade.

Ken Green: GE wants to sell wind turbines. Of course, they’re going to say that.

Aimee Christensen: GE sells a lot of coal --

Ken Green: And as for subsidies, the more subsidies, you just said earlier that these technologies are now mature so they shouldn’t need subsidies. And the --

Aimee Christensen: Wind power is absolutely mature and this is about --

Ken Green: And the idea that we keep subsidizing -- my mother always said two wrongs don’t make a right. So if it was wrong to subsidize fossil fuels and now we don’t like the consequences of this, greenhouse gases and so forth, why is it right to subsidize wind and solar power when we may not like the consequences either?

Aimee Christensen: This is about an investment in America’s future, and it’s an investment in a transition that we’re making.

Ken Green: It’s a poor investment.

Aimee Christensen: No, this investment -- as we said, this investment has far exceeded by the returns on that investment and the job creation per dollar spent far greater in the renewable sector.

Ken Green: We’ll have to agree to disagree on that. But I’d like to -- we heard the story before with ethanol that, well, it only needs subsidies until it’s a mature technology, and then we’ll take away the subsidies. And now, we have an absolute disaster with ethanol environmentally and economically and it’s still getting massive subsidies because you have an entrenched lobbying interest. And that’s what wind and solar are turning into. The idea of they’re going to turn away their subsidies ever is absurd.

Susan McGinnis: Alright, a final word from Amy.

Aimee Christensen: Final word is we need to have an honest conversation about where we’re going for energy future, what are we willing to invest in and what kind of returns do we want to see on the investment and let’s look across the board where are our priorities, have a conversation with industry and with government and with the American people and decide where our priorities need to lie.

Susan McGinnis: Alright, Aimee Christensen and Ken Green, thank you so much for joining us. Mark Fulton in New York, thank you very much.