Two ways to create bad energy policy are with bad legislation, or with constantly changing legislation. Either make long-range planning impossible for businesses.

Stable policy provides clear benefits for industries, and the best example of how it works is in this country is in the ethanol industry.

Growth in the U.S. ethanol market has been driven by three legislative 'legs' -- an import tariff that keeps out foreign competitors, the renewable fuels standard that creates a predictable demand for production targets, and a credit that makes an incentive to blend ethanol into other fuel.

Of the three, the renewable fuels standards -- targets for production through 2022 -- have best enabled long-range planning in the industry.

Corn ethanol may be reaching its limits, but various forms of algae and other genetically modified or bio-engineered liquid fuels are on the rise. The stable policy helped create the infrastructure for this next generation of biofuels, and thus, investments in all of the liquid alternative fuels.

These long lead times for biofuel supports have spurred longterm investment, and the United States is now poised to become the largest biodiesel market by 2012, overtaking Germany. It's already the world's leading ethanol market. The governments of China and India have major biodiesel initiatives modeled after our investment in ethanol.

Our policies for solar and wind have not had long-range support. President Carter put a solar roof on the White House and President Reagan took it down. That typifies the longstanding battle on energy between Democrats and Republicans, the stops and starts in developing renewable energy each time the power in Congress and the White House changes hands.

Perhaps we could simply agree that renewable energy is a public good, and that the fossil fuels are not, and act accordingly. But there is still a wide gulf between Democrats and Republicans on the direction of our energy policy.

That's why it's so fragmented and we are so far behind Europe's carbon policy. The divide is exacerbated by the way Congress works. We have two Senators for every state, whether that state has 30 million constituents, or very few, so the interests of smaller constituent groups have as much weight as those of large ones.

But biofuels garnered bipartisan support because the broad swathe of farm states across the nation's heartland created both Democratic and Republican support for the promise of home-grown energy independance.

The solar energy lobby learned from biofuel growth and it worked hard to extend a one-time, eight-year extension of the solar investment credit. That's enough time to establish the solar industry , at which point it would run stong on its own, regardless of who controls Congress. (The wind industry got only a one-year emergency extension of their PTC)

On Friday, with a rider on the bailout bill, the solar lobby finally succeeded in that long range goal with the passage of H1424. The federal subsidy is 30 percent, so homeowners and utilities will now have eight years to make a much smaller outlay to go solar. In 2003 it was capped at a mere $2,000 for non-commercial buildings -- hardly a dent in the upfront expense of a typical solar installation.

Because of the split in the Senate, it was achieved only by simultaneously subsidizing fossil fuels (tar sands and oil shale) as well. (And it was tied to a motley assortment of must-pass bills on both go-rounds: first to disaster relief, and second, to the bailout bill, mental health parity and AMT extensions.)

But the end result was that George Bush signed virtually the same clean energy bill he had vowed to veto in December. And John McCain and many Republicans voted for renewable energy for almost the only time since the beginning of the Clinton/Gore administration. (Conversely, Obama and Boxer and most of the Democrats voted for fossil fuels for the second time in five years) The renewables portion will cost the taxpayers $7 billion, and should create at least $232 billion in solar jobs alone.

Given the makeup of the Senate and the consequent back and forth tug of war over 30 years between these two warring visions of America's future energy supply, it's understandable that the 'sausage making' is so bizarre. It is an exhausting and ridiculous way to create energy policy.