"Not even half the story..."

When Mitt Romney's Bain Capital invested in companies, it was his own money. When Barack Obama's energy department invests in companies, it's mine. And yours...

Should We Be Bullish on Solar?

Megan McCardle has an interesting and worthwhile piece on the likelihood of solar energy costs falling below those of conventional energies any time soon. But she finishes it with a pretty silly question...

I'd close by restating Tyler's question in a slightly different way: if the price of solar is really likely to keep falling until it's cheaper than coal, why don't we see this revealed in the behavior of global warming activists? Where are Greens saying "We've decided to move on to more pressing issues, because clearly, the carbon emissions problem is just about solved."

For some people, maybe even most, the concern is, in fact, carbon emissions. For many of the activists, however, all of the evidence suggests that the concern is not carbon emissions as much as it is concern about the consumption and lifestyle of the US population. For my entire lifetime, the people in the vanguard of this movement have responded to any proposed crisis with the same set of policy prescriptions - more central control, more rationing, less freedom for individual movement, less individual autonomy. In short, for the most dedicated of the global warming activists, carbon emission control is simply a pretext for the actual goal - socialism.

"Solyndra Was Just a Bad Bet From the Beginning"

Good piece from Megan McArdle on why Solyndra was a bad idea from the start, tax dollars essentially flushed...

Scale matters--you can't take billion-dollar fliers on too many ideas. Appropriateness matters--retirees shouldn't put their living expenses in tech stocks. And the potential payoff matters--we should not invest billions to develop a slightly better form of white-out, or into experiments that have a 1-in-a-trillion chance of developing a low-cost way to turn lead into gold.

I think Solyndra flunks on all three counts.

Read it all.

Worse and worse: New e-mails show White House rushed OMB to approve Solyndra loan

Haven't been following the Solyndra story? It can be difficult, I know, when the mainstream press isn't interested. But thanks to the internet, there are outlets for stuff that the press would have been able to suppress 15 years ago. There's a lot of bad behavior here...

Until now, the White House has insisted that it didn’t intervene in the deal, but what else would you call it if, due to time constraints, OMB was forced to use a possibly sub-standard model that led to approval of a loan that everyone else knew shouldn’t have been made?

This is how much these people care about taxpayer money. Half a billion dollars down the tubes because they wanted to get one of their speeches just right.

In terms of our current financial situation, of course, half a billion dollars is meaningless. But it is indicative of mindset.

The Obama Economy in miniature

Solyndra to Declare Bankruptcy

Solyndra, a major manufacturer of solar technology in Fremont, has shut its doors, according to employees at the campus.

"I was told by a security guard to get my [stuff] and leave," one employee said. The company employs a little more than 1,000 employees worldwide, according to its website.

Shortly after it opened a massive $700 million facility, it canceled plans for a public stock offering earlier this year and warned it would be in significant trouble if federal loan guarantees did not go through.

The company has said it will make a statement at 9am California time, though it's not clear what that statement will be. An NBC Bay Area photographer on the scene reports security guards are not letting visitors on campus. He says "people are standing around in disbelief." The employees have been given yellow envelopes with instructions on how to get their last checks.

Solyndra was touted by the Obama administration as a prime example of how green technology could deliver jobs.

I have enormous sympathy for the people losing jobs. There's no part of that that's fun. But if a company can't compete, those resources are much better spent in a company that can. And having the government prop up a company that can't compete is just a plain and simple wealth transfer.

Solyndra is almost the archetype of an Obama economy job creator. Which is a big part of why there aren't many jobs being created...

Feeding The Masses On Unicorn Ribs

Walter Russell Mead, with a brilliant analogy on the "green jobs" fiasco:

Many liberals want green jobs to exist so badly that they don’t fully grasp how otherworldly and ineffectual this advocacy makes the President look to unemployed meat packers and truck drivers.

Let me put it this way. A GOP candidate might feel a need to please creationist voters and say a few nice things about intelligent design. That is politics as usual; it gins up the base and drive the opposition insane with fury and rage. No harm, really, and no foul.

But if that same politician then proposed to base federal health policy on a hunt for the historical Garden of Eden so that we could replace Medicare by feeding old people on fruit from the Tree of Life, he would have gone from quackery-as-usual to raving incompetence. True, the Tree of Life approach polls well in GOP focus groups: no cuts to Medicare benefits, massive tax savings, no death panels, Biblical values on display. Its only flaw is that there won’t be any magic free fruit that lets us live forever, and sooner or later people will notice that and be unhappy.

Green jobs are the Democratic equivalent of Tree of Life Medicare; they scratch every itch of every important segment of the base and if they actually existed they would be an excellent policy choice. But since they are no more available to solve our jobs problem than the Tree of Life stands ready to make health care affordable, a green jobs policy boils down to a promise to feed the masses on tasty unicorn ribs from the Great Invisible Unicorn Herd that only the greens can see.

Read it all...

Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live Up to Promises

You know that it had to have been horribly painful for the New York Times to print this...

In the Bay Area as in much of the country, the green economy is not proving to be the job-creation engine that many politicians envisioned. President Obama once pledged to create five million green jobs over 10 years. Gov. Jerry Brown promised 500,000 clean-technology jobs statewide by the end of the decade. But the results so far suggest such numbers are a pipe dream.

“I won’t say I’m not frustrated,” said Van Jones, an Oakland activist who served briefly as Mr. Obama’s green-jobs czar before resigning under fire after conservative critics said he had signed a petition accusing the Bush administration of deliberately allowing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a claim Mr. Jones denies.

A study released in July by the non-partisan Brookings Institution found clean-technology jobs accounted for just 2 percent of employment nationwide and only slightly more — 2.2 percent — in Silicon Valley. Rather than adding jobs, the study found, the sector actually lost 492 positions from 2003 to 2010 in the South Bay, where the unemployment rate in June was 10.5 percent.

Sigh.

In war, Helmuth von Moltke said that "no plan survives contact with the enemy." (Ok, that's a pithier Engish version of the actual German quote, but work with me, here.) That's the case for liberal economic plans and reality, too. Any plan, the success of which is dependent on people not responding to incentives and disincentives, and economic realities ceasing to function, is doomed to failure. And they don't care. Their intentions are good, so that's the important thing. They want to create "green jobs," and they're willing to spend other peoples' money on it, and therefore, the "green jobs" should materialize!

The world doesn't work that way.