"If wind and solar power were practical, entrepreneurs would invest in it. There would be no need for government to take money from taxpayers and give it to people pushing green products."
That's the entire paragraph. He provides no logic or evidence in support of that statement, he simply takes for granted that, just by saying it, it automatically makes it true.
This guy is supposed to be a voice of reason? What the fuck is he doing with his left hand?
As with many libertarian free-market fundamentalists, Stossel's aphoristic understanding of economics could fit inside a fortune cookie; it appears he showed up for the first five minutes of the first day of Econ 101, learned that "markets are good", then failed to stick around for the next part where you learn about the concept of market failure. In this case, the failure is not only in the free market's inability to punish coal plants for the negative externalities of pollution and CO2, there's also the market's failure to reward companies for the positive externalities of developing new, green technology.
In a free market economy, a company that created a revolutionary solar panel might make it rich, but they would never be fully rewarded for all the good they did, because within a few years, other companies would rip them off and copy their ideas, stealing part of their profits. That's why patents exist, and of course, that's when the free-market dogmatism of every conservative breaks down, because the value of every stock in their portfolio is dependent on the government meddling in the free market, by enforcing intellectual property.
But even with patents, companies that revolutionize technology are still not fully rewarded. Patents have time limits, countries like China ignore them, and there are ways to circumvent them by copying the bulk of an idea but adding a minor modification. If a company has an idea that could create a trillion dollars of profits over the next 100 years, but 90% of that wealth would be captured by copy-cats, you can figure that the company is only going to be willing to invest $100 billion dollars in the idea, rather than the trillion the market believes the idea is worth. That is a market failure.
Most of the technological development behind coal plants, and gas engines has already taken place, so companies don't have to worry about making a big investment in research that will mostly benefit other people; in fact, what they're mostly doing with coal and oil is ripping off the ideas of the past. Stossel writes in favor of nuclear power, but nuclear companies today are using technology that was developed by the government. Private corporations wouldn't have had an adequate incentive to do that research because they would have known that, as soon as they figured out how to harness the atom, hitler, stalin, or the US would have kidnapped them and stolen their ideas. In cases where an idea would benefit the people as a whole much more than the inventor himself, only the government can have the full incentive because only the government represents the wishes of the people.
This is part of the reason why a lot of great inventions like the internet and GPS were spurred on by government investment. Of course, conservatives will argue that those inventions don't count because they were made by the military, and somehow, the military is not the government.
The truth is, government subsidies and incentives are the only way to correct for the market failure and properly motivate private corporations to research green technologies. It's either that or you just have the government do the work itself, but then Stossel would have to retreat to his underground bunker and load up his cache of libertarian assault rifles.
The weapons cache is the "kill-or-be-killed" flip-side of the libertarian nut-job's supposed "live-and-let-live" worldview.
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