POSTED AT 7:24 AM ON SEPTEMBER 4, 2012 BY MATT VESPA
[ ECONOMICS ]
I guess the epic failure of Solyndra wasn’t a prophetic incident the Obama administration took seriously. He has doubled down on his miserable green energy initiative with a new executive order. The Blaze took excerpts from Reuters on the president’s announcement yesterday.
’Today, we are taking another step to strengthen American manufacturing by boosting energy efficiency for businesses across the nation,’ said President Obama.‘This action will cut costs, increase efficiency, and help our businesses create strong, middle class jobs. We’ll continue to do everything we can to put more people back to work and build an economy that lasts,’ he added.The order, which aims to increase the number of cogeneration plants in the U.S. by 50 percent by 2020 and slash carbon emissions by 150 million tons per year, is the administration’s latest effort to ‘deploy cleaner and more efficient energy production in the country by working around political resistance to climate change and ‘green’ energy legislation on Capitol Hill,’ Reuters reports.
Furthermore, ”the order dictates that the Departments of Energy, Commerce, and Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection Agency coordinate their actions to provide “policy and technical assistance” to states in order to ensure energy efficiency targets are being met. The order also ‘establishes a new national goal of 40 gigawatts of new combined heat and power capacity by 2020, a 50% increase from today,’ according to a statement from the White House.”
In all, “meeting this goal would save energy users $10 billion per year, result in $40 to $80 billion in new capital investment in manufacturing and other facilities that would create American jobs, and would reduce emissions equivalent to 25 million cars,’ the statement adds.”
This order still puzzles me since former Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein has stated that clean energy doesn’t do much for job creation.
Additionally, back in January:
“CBS News counted 12 clean energy companies that are having trouble after collectively being approved for more than $6.5 billion in federal assistance. Five have filed for bankruptcy: The junk bond-rated Beacon, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, AES’ subsidiary Eastern Energy and Solyndra.SunPower landed a deal linked to a $1.2 billion loan guarantee last fall, after a French oil company took it over. On its last financial statement, SunPower owed more than it was worth.First Solar was the biggest S&P 500 loser in 2011 and its CEO was cut loose – even as taxpayers were forced to back a whopping $3 billion in company loans.Nobody from the Energy Department would agree to an interview.”How safe were the loans?“[Economist] Peter Morici replied… It’s, it is a junk bond…but it’s not even a good junk bond. It’s well below investment grade.Was the Energy Department investing tax dollars in something that’s not even a good junk bond? Morici says yes.This level of bond has about a 70 percent chance of failing in the long term,” he said.”
Does sounds like a sound investment for the American people? In addition, is this executive order constitutional? It certainly aims to circumvent legislative hurdles and therefore, as Mark Levin noted, Obama ”is legislating by presidential fiat!…this is unconstitutional.”
Courtesy of whitehouse.gov
Courtesy of whitehouse.gov
h/t MK
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