With the Solyndra scandal still swirling, the Obama administration is under pressure to reveal the financial condition of the solar companies that received $4.75 billion in similar federal loan guarantees on the last day of the program.
Republican lawmakers on two House committees are seeking details about the loans given to First Solar, SunPower Corp. and ProLogis. Of those three companies, troubling financial revelations have emerged about SunPower, which sponsored a solar project that received a $1.2 billion loan, more than twice the money approved for Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy last month after receiving a $528 million loan.
The Energy Department says on its website that the $1.2 billion loan to help build the California Valley Solar Ranch in San Luis Obispo County, a project that will help create 15 permanent jobs, which adds up to the equivalent of $80 million in taxpayer money for each job.
President Barack Obama’s “green jobs” initiatives suffered another major blow late Monday, as the nonprofit National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado, announced a plan to lay off roughly 10 percent of its staff through a voluntary buy-out plan.
According to the Denver Post, the lab plans to eliminate between 100 and 150 of its 1,350 jobs. The Obama administration supported the NREL in 2009 with roughly $200 million in stimulus grants. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu visited Golden in May 2009 to promote the NREL as a beneficiary of those funds.
As if the Solyndra and LightSquared controversies were not enough, another one of President Obama’s favorite companies pushing the green agenda is being investigated, this time in China.
Johnson Controls Inc., which is headquartered in Wisconsin and operates a battery manufacturing facility in Shanghai, has recently come under scrutiny by locals for excessive cases of lead poisoning in children living in the area. According to China Daily, 25 children in Kangqiao town are being treated for lead poisoning. The Johnson Controls plant, along with others in the area, has been shut down.
President Obama on Green Jobs at 2011 State of the Union Address
Obama Regime Steals Billions from Taxpayers – Blows it on Failed Green Projects
By Jim Hoft
The Obama Administration spent nearly half of the $38.6 billion ($17.2 billion) set aside for his green energy programs and was only able to create 3,545 permanent green jobs. This comes out to a staggering $4,853,000 per job.
Obama continued to push green energy initiatives in his 2011 State of the Union Address.
The Obama Administration has blown billions of taxpayer dollars on green energy and has only succeeded in producing a few thousand jobs.
The green-jobs revolution may be going up in smoke.Despite billions of dollars in federal investment and cheerleading from President Obama, even the most ardent supporters of a transformed, job-generating energy sector based largely on wind, solar and other renewable sources acknowledge that their dreams have not translated into reality. The records for other countries chasing green employment opportunities have been equally unimpressive.
Rep. Maxine Waters, California Democrat, told MSNBC last month that, despite impassioned support from liberal Democrats and environmentalists, “green jobs” initiatives “have been about a lot of talk, and not a lot has been happening on that.”
The absence of a promised boom in environmental jobs has become a talking point among Republicans who are campaigning to unseat Mr. Obama in the 2012 election.
Mr. Obama “keeps talking about green jobs,” former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said during the GOP candidates debate Wednesday night. “Where are they? Let’s have real jobs.”
Talk of green jobs was conspicuous by its absence from Mr. Obama’s jobs speech to a joint session of Congress on Thursday night. He gave the address on the same day that the FBI raided California solar-energy company Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy and laid off at least 900 full-time employees.
Despite Solyndra’s abrupt closing and bankruptcy announcement last month, the Department of Energy (DOE) is undeterred. Just this month, the agency made two more loan guarantees worth millions of dollars to alternative energy firms.And, as was the case with Solyndra, officials and investors with the two new companies have strong financial ties to President Barack Obama.
On September 7, the DOE announced its plan to guarantee 80 percent – or $275 million – of a $344 million private loan taken out by the firm SolarCity. The company installs rooftop solar systems that harvests electricity SolarCity then sells.
GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, the head of Barack Obama’s Economic Advisory Panel, was invited to sit with the First Lady during the president’s speech to Congress this past week. He’s been a strong supporter of the president since he took over the White House and his companies have received plenty of government funds as well.
GE was awarded 44 contracts totaling over $46,000,000 and 44 grants totaling more than $79,000,000 from the Obama-Pelosi $757 billion dollar stimulus package. Millions of dollars in stimulus funds were used by GE in green energy projects.
Today GE announced that it was going to gut its offshore wind-power plans.
Part of a Joint Investigation with the Department of Energy
By RJ Middleton
FBI agents armed with search warrants descended Thursday morning on bankrupt solar company Solynrda.
The investigation comes after a request by the Department of Energy’s inspector general, FBI spokesman Peter Lee told NBC Bay Area News.
Agents arrived at Solyndra at 7a.m. and were examining the factory. Solynrda has a skeleton crew of 100 workers on the scene, who are closing the factory down.
Solyndra filed for bankruptcy last week, shocking both workers and the Obama administration, which had given the startup $535 million in low interest loans.Â
The announcement was a devastating blow to Mr. Obama who is set to deliver a speech on job creation Thursday evening.
Congress has demanded a hearing into the matter. Wednesday the company was reported to be for sale.
There are no reports of any arrests at this time.
Solyndra officials made numerous visits — 20 — to the White House, according to logs and reporting by The Daily Caller.
The world has a food shortage. This isn’t speculative or subjective, and it’s not fear-mongering or alarmist. It’s a well-documented fact and, what’s more, the real experts – those who aren’t influenced by government or corporate interests – have been trying to make that case for months.
Moreover, these same experts say, the shortages are causing global food prices to rise – dramatically in some cases – which is only leading to more hunger, more pain and more hardship.
So, what is the United States doing to blunt the effects of this food shortage? What is official U.S. policy regarding, say, the production of corn – the primary ingredient in scores of food products and livestock feed? Well, officially, our policy is to burn up a substantial amount of corn every year in our automobiles – food that could be used to feed Americans and the world.
Polar bears drowning in an Alaskan sea because the ice packs are melting-it’s the iconic image of the global warming debate.
But the validity of the science behind the image-presented as an ignoble testament to our environment in peril by Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth-is now part of a federal investigation that has the environmental community on edge.
Special agents from the Interior Department’s inspector general’s office are questioning the two government scientists about the paper they wrote on drowned polar bears, suggesting mistakes were made in the math and as to how the bears actually died, and the department is eyeing another study currently underway on bear populations.
Biologist Charles Monnett, the lead scientist on the paper, was placed on administrative leave July 18. Fellow biologist Jeffrey Gleason, who also contributed to the study, is being questioned, but has not been suspended.
I’ve been tough (I think) in challenging former Minnesota Gov. (and now presidential candidate) Tim Pawlenty​ about his past support for cap-and-trade and policies to constrain carbon dioxide emissions. In December 2009, when he first started visiting New Hampshire, he was still talking like CO2 was pollution, and still failed to remove his state from the Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Accord.
Now he’s pretty much completed a 180-degree turnaround on the whole issue – even questioning the science of human-caused global warming, as revealed in a Miami Herald interview with him this week…
A Salinas car manufacturing company that was expected to build environmentally friendly electric cars and create new jobs folded before almost any vehicles could run off the assembly line.
The city of Salinas had invested more than half a million dollars in Green Vehicles, an electric car start-up company.
All of that money is now gone, according to Green Vehicles President and Co-Founder Mike Ryan.
House Republicans charged Wednesday that the Obama administration is aiming to establish a “propaganda office†for Democratic initiatives on global warming through a proposal to consolidate operations in a new “climate service†office within the Commerce Department
Tensions boiled over at a congressional hearing as officials of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) defended the consolidation plan contained in President Obama’s fiscal 2012 budget and denied having any ulterior motive.
NOAA hopes to move more than 50 percent of its resources into the new climate service department, which it says will serve as the central clearinghouse for farmers, local governments, the military and academics seeking information on climate trends.
But a number of GOP lawmakers, who have staunchly opposed the administration’s climate and energy policies in the past, challenged NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco at a hearing of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.
When Barack Obama spoke of “necessarily bankrupting†coal-fueled electricity producers, he claimed that the explosion in “green jobs†would replace the workers dislocated by penalizing fossil fuels. So far, though, there is little evidence of any explosion in green jobs, or even significant job creation at all. As Politico reports, the Obama administration is having to fall back on “saved and created†language to describe its big investment in the green-collar field:
President Barack Obama heads to an energy plant in North Carolina on Monday to talk once again about the job-creating power of a green economy.
The catch? Nearly three years into Obama’s presidency, the White House can’t point to much solid evidence that significant numbers of Americans are scoring the green jobs the president has been touting.
Monthly Labor Department employment reports say nothing about the new clean energy workforce, while an effort to document how many Americans actually make a living in the “green collar†field may not be done by November 2012.
Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers suggests 225,000 clean energy jobs were either created or preserved through the third quarter of 2010 thanks to more than $80 billion in the economic stimulus package. But those are estimates at best.
At $80 billion, that would mean a cost of $355,555.56 of public subsidy per job created … or “saved.â€Â At best, as Politico states.
Kill a camel, earn cash for cutting greenhouse gases: That offer may be coming soon in Australia, where vast numbers of the nonnative, methane-belching animals have been trampling the Outback for more than a century.
The government has proposed that killing camels be officially registered as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Australia has the world’s largest population of wild camels — an estimated 1.2 million — and considers them to be a growing environmental problem.
By Stephen Clark
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