First there was Solyndra. The company was going to deliver cutting edge solar technology. It didn't happen and the company is now defunct after running through half a billion or so of government money.
Now, it appears that Fisker, which was going to revolutionize the automobile industry, is on life support in spite of similarly large loan guarantees from the Department of Energy, which really knows how to pick them. The car was going to be both cool and green. As Alex Davies notes in this account of the company's fall, “Justin Bieber and Leonardo DiCaprio were huge fans.”
When solar panel maker Solyndra declared bankruptcy in September 2011, the Obama administration defended its $535 million loan guarantee to the company by touting the need to compete with China. At a congressional hearing, Jonathan Silver, then executive director of the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office, said, “[In 2010, China] alone provided more than $30 billion in credit to the country’s largest solar manufacturers through the government-controlled China Development Bank. That’s roughly 20 times larger than America’s investment in the same time period.”
When solar panel maker Solyndra declared bankruptcy in September 2011, the Obama administration defended its $535 million loan guarantee to the company by touting the need to compete with China. At a congressional hearing, Jonathan Silver, then executive director of the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office, said, “[In 2010, China] alone provided more than $30 billion in credit to the country’s largest solar manufacturers through the government-controlled China Development Bank. That’s roughly 20 times larger than America’s investment in the same time period.”
Lis Smith, a spokesman for President Barack Obama's reelection campaign, touted Solyndra by saying the failed energy company that received federally backed loans has been "widely praised as successful and innovative."
Mitt Romney's latest web ad targets President Obama's inability to create jobs, the failures of the Department of Energy's loan guarantee program, and "contracts steered to ‘friends & family.'" Watch here:
Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics, takes to Facebook today to review the Avengers, a movie about a bunch of superheroes banding together to save the world, “which focuses on a new, limitless clean energy source called ‘The Tesseract,’” according to Chu.
President Obama's reelection team released a campaign ad this morning that features this graphic, touting the supposed "jobs created by President Obama's clean energy initiatives."
President Obama's secretary of energy, Steven Chu, is a smart guy. But in these two clips, from a hearing on the Hill yesterday, Rep. Jim Jordan seems to get the better of the cabinet member:
Solyndra, the bankrupt solar panel firm at the center of the Obama administration's green energy loan program scandal, still owes U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. So why is it destroying millions of dollars in saleable assets? CBS San Francisco reports:
Thankfully, most Americans were probably too busy with the holiday to read the preposterous editorial yesterday in the New York Times. The Grey Lady examined the Solyndra scandal and concluded Republicans are really off base for having the temerity to complain about throwing taxpayer dollars down a rathole in the name of enriching big Democratic donors:
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