One of the most common arguments against investing in renewable energy is the high initial cost involved in building the infrastructure. Many economists and investors, big and small, say this alone is a valid argument for not investing in a renewable energy infrastructure. This kind of reasoning is built on the basis of the history of dirt cheap cost of fossil fuel energy, which is quickly becoming a point of past history. Simply put, no other energy source can come close to the EROEI(energy returned on energy invested) of fossil fuel energy sources of the past, this is undeniable. And while the costs of petroleum, natural gas, and coal are on the rise even the current market increases still make them the cheapest forms of energy around. But their comes both tremendous hidden costs and very delayed costs to using fossil fuel energy sources that effect everything from our national economy to our very own personal health.

     To understand some of these costs we must first look into the near history of the fossil fuel boom. When the current infrastructure was first developed in the late industrial age and then expanded over the years, fossil fuels represented a mostly domestic product in the United States. So the investment in anything related to their use would contribute both initially to the local economies of the installers and manufacturers, and later to the economic bottom line of the domestic energy producers. So that in the past installing a heating fuel system, a backup generator or any number of devices that fed from the fossil fuel powered grid created an overall positive domestic economic growth. This is not the case today.

     Today if you install a heating fuel system in your house, the initial infrastructure investment may be mostly local, but almost all of the long term energy costs will be paid to foreign oil countries because we have to import the majority of the oil we consume. So there is sort of negative EROEI, the longer you keep using the fossil fuel based system, the more negative impact it will have on the investment by creating inflation through trade imbalance. This alone counters the higher initial investment cost, but it is far from the only cost of using such systems.

     There is also the environmental aspect of the fossil fuel grid to be considered. Such impacts may have been ignored by many generations of people because they have an even longer term, negative rebound, making them doubly hard to directly associate with their source. We know with good certainty of the negative nature of fossil fuel based pollutants. But because the worst negative effects may not be seen for a generation or two from the use, these environmental costs are harder to assess properly. We know that acidification of the oceans from excess fossil fuel CO2 emissions, which create carbonic acid in sea water, decreases the survival rate of young fish, which raises the cost of fish staples. But the exact amount ocean acidification costs us per ton of emissions released remains ambiguous. And because it is ambiguous, it is often dismissed and ignored.

     We know that benzene is a poisonous and carcinogenic compound found in petroleum products and that it is released into the atmosphere when we burn or expose fossil fuels. But because the health effects usually occur from long term exposure and are not always directly linkable to benzene exposure we don't know the exact cost of the impact on national health care per ton of benzine released from fossil fuels. Of course we all know health care costs are rising, but because it is difficult to quantify the effects of low level benzene poisoning the correlation is ignored by most.

     All of these factors have a negative impact on the economy as a whole, no use of fossil fuels creates only a local impact. And all these negatives eventually have to paid for in one way or another, and most often by our children and not ourselves. On the other hand, most renewable energy sources are almost completely free of the negative returns of the fossil fuel grid.

     With renewable energy sources, we pay up front, a little more in infrastructure returns no hidden costs in the future. With fossil fuels, it is exactly the opposite, you invest only a little money up front but then you pay in broad and long term ways. And this is what investors and economists need to come to realize, that the justification for renewable energy is that it has no hidden costs of ownership. That renewable resources will not poison our children, or rot our economy from the inside out. That a higher cost paid up front is better than a hidden cost paid by our progeny.