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The noise made about the Department of Energy's (DOE) renewable energy loan program mostly concerns its failures, and particularly the unspectacular collapse of Solyndra. But the program actually has a failure rate that's ridiculously low (2.28 percent), and is even seeing returns on a number of its investments. This fact is met mostly with silence. Also, the government's participation in the success of Tesla Motors (the electric car company received a massive low-interest loan from the DOE—US $465 million) gets much less attention in the press than its participation in Fisker Automotive, an electric car maker that went the unhappy way of Solyndra. A study by Media Matters found that the mainstream media mentioned the government's loan "in 20 percent of their coverage of Tesla in 2013... Meanwhile, 84 percent of coverage of Fisker."

But this is how capitalism actually works. Firstly, nothing big in the economy happens without state support. Capitalism (an advanced form of the market) is not possible in the absence of a strong state. You can't have a corporation the size of Microsoft or General Motors without limited liability. Such institutions do not happen naturally. They are political to the bone. This is why the kind of massive social change that's required to make this society less dependent on fossil fuels and more committed to shared forms of transportation demands the kind of gigantic investment that made the society so dependent on fossil fuels in the first place. The force behind that transformation, which accelerated after the Second World War, had nothing to do with the market. Funds from taxes paid for the infrastructure that made the automobile the dominant mode of transportation. The market only appeared on the roads, not before them. The market itself can't even happen by way of itself.

For those who care to know, the Tesla situation is a classic example of a species of state planning that, despite its unpopularity among neoclassical/neoliberal economists, has yet to go extinct: Industrial Policy.