Big Oil will not thank Government for Fracking, and now wants to take all the credit.

If Mitt Romney and the Republicans had their way,alternative energy subsidies would disappear completely. Let the free marketdecide. But in reality, what should happen is just the opposite, which is typical when we're talking about Republicans.

While the American public would be happy to cut subsidies tobig oil, “opposite day” Republicans want to keep giving taxpayer dollars to big oil. Solar and wind...forget it.
They're quick to point to examples like Solyndra, who couldn’t competewith cheap Chinese labor. But China subsidizes solar, and helped drive down prices, killing the American company. But what happened is normal when it comes to developing new alternativeenergies. The story below shows how big oil is now trying to take credit for developingfracking, even though they would have given up decades earlier if it wasn’t forgovernment subsidies and tax credits:  

AP: It sounds like a free-market success story: a naturalgas boom created by drilling company innovation, delivering a vast new sourceof cheap energy without the government subsidies that solar and wind powerdemand. "The free market has worked its magic," the Barnett ShaleEnergy Education Council, an industry group, claimed over the summer. The boomhappened "away from the greedy grasp of Washington," the AmericanEnterprise Institute, a think tank, wrote in an essay this year. If bureaucrats"had known this was going on," the essay went on, "surelyWashington would have done something to slow it down, tax it more, or stop italtogether."

But the pioneers of fracking tell a different story:

But those who helped pioneer the technique known ashydraulic 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 developfracking, and billions more in tax breaks.

Now, those industry pioneers say their own effort shows thatthe government should back research into future sources of energy — fordecades, if need be — to promote breakthroughs. For all its success now, manypeople in the oil and gas industry itself once thought shale gas was a waste oftime.

"There's no point in mincing words. Some people thoughtit was stupid," said Dan Steward, a geologist who began working with theTexas natural gas firm Mitchell Energy in 1981.

In 1975, the Department of Energy began funding researchinto fracking and horizontal drilling, but it took more than 20 years toperfect the process. Alex Crawley, a former Department of Energy employee,recalled that some early tests were spectacular — in a bad way. "There'snot a lot of companies that would stay with something this long. Most companieswould have given up," he said, crediting founder George Mitchell as avisionary who also got support from the government at key points.

"The government has to be involved, to some degree,with new technologies," Steward said … the fracking pioneers point outthat it's impossible to predict how and when research will pay off. "Itwouldn't be research if you already knew that it was going to beeffective," said Crawley.

Terry Engelder, a Penn State University geologist known forhis enthusiastic support for gas drilling, said the story of how shale gas wentfrom longshot to head of the pack — and how long that took — shows that serioussupport for renewable energy research makes sense, too. "These renewableshave a huge upside," Engelder said. "In my view, the subsidies arereally very appropriate."