Tag Archives: Clean Energy

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Navy buys fuel for $15 per gallon from Democrat-connected green energy firm

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I found this Hot Air story on Right Wing News. Hot Air was at the top of John Hawkins’ list of the top 40 conservative blogs.

Excerpt: (with links removed)

This is going to help the Defense Department weather looming budget cuts, for sure.  Teaming up with the Department of Agriculture (which has a cheery Rotary Club ring to it), the Navy has purchased 450,000 gallons of biofuel for about $16 a gallon, or about 4 times the price of its standard marine fuel, JP-5, which has been going for under $4 a gallon.

You won’t be surprised to learn that a member of Obama’s presidential transition team, T. J. Glauthier, is a “strategic advisor” at Solazyme, the California company that is selling a portion of the biofuel to the Navy.  Glauthier worked – shock, shock – on the energy-sector portion of the 2009 stimulus bill.

The Navy sale isn’t Solazyme’s first trip to the public trough, of course.  The company got a $21.8 million grant from the 2009 stimulus package.

See, this is why we need to vote for lower and lower taxes. The more money that you give the government to spend, the more likely they are going to waste it buying votes and rewarding their supporters and fundraisers. Do you think that a private company could waste money like this, and stay afloat? No way – they have competitors to worry about. If they waste money, then they will go out of business. However, the government can just spend the money with abandon – it just gets added to the national debt. Eventually, the young people, who vote for for Obama in droves, will have to pay the money back. This will be hard for them to do given the fact that many of them are growing up without two parents supporting them, and often without a good education. What a mess. Leave the money in the hands of the private sector schools and private sector job creators – they actually have to care about pleasing customers and reducing wasteful spending.

Let’s do a quick review of more instances of stimulus spending.

What exactly was he trying to stimulate? His 2012 election campaign?

By the way, check out John’s list of the top 40 blogs – I am number 40.

News

Obama pleases environmental lobby by killing 20,000-job Keystone XL pipeline

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Obama Economic Record November 2011
Obama Economic Record November 2011

From the Daily Caller.

Excerpt:

Roughly 20,000 oil industry construction jobs are being thrown under Obama’s 2012 campaign bus, largely because the president needs to pump up his sagging support among the environmentalists.

The pitch came Thursday when President Barack Obama put his leadership behind a State Department plan to study alternative routes for the pipeline, which is intended to bring oil from Alberta in Canada to oil refineries along the Gulf Coast.

“We should take the time to ensure that all questions are properly addressed and all the potential impacts are properly understood,” said Obama’s afternoon statement.

The construction jobs, and the revenue from operating the Keystone XL pipeline, may now go to Canadian workers.

That’s because Canadian government officials are already planning to help build a competing pipeline from Alberta’s oil fields to new West Coast ports near Vancouver. The likely destination point is the port of Kitimat in British Columbia.

The U.S. Department of State will begun studying an alternative route for the Keystone pipeline, even though an earlier department study had concluded the proposed route is the best of several alternatives. The new study will delay any final approval until after the 2012 election, allowing Obama to boost his support among environmentalist groups, activists and voters.

But the delay may kill the U.S. segment of any pipeline, because the decision increases the environmentalist movement’s clout during any future round of approval disputes, and also spurs the development of a pipeline through Canada.

The job-killing decision was panned by GOP legislators and business groups.

“More than 20,000 new American jobs have just been sacrificed in the name of political expediency,” said a statement from Ohio Rep. John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

“This is clearly a political decision and everyone knows it… Politics has trumped jobs in this decision and we can only wonder if the Administration’s delay will cause Canada to turn their pipeline west and ship their energy and American jobs elsewhere,” said  statement from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

But the decision helps the Democratic-allied green-energy industry, which is now reliant on government subsidies to compete against the oil energy industry.

The oil that would be pumped through the Keystone XL pipeline would make gas cheaper for drivers, and worsen the competitiveness of the green-tech companies.

The stock value of green-energy companies, and their supply of commercial investment, has already dropped in the last several months because investment analysts believe an Obama loss in 2012 will prompt GOP legislators to cut federal subsidies.

Before his 2008 election, Obama predicted he would raise oil-energy prices to spur the green-energy industry.

The Wall Street Journal explains more.

Excerpt:

In April 2010 and again this August, State produced multivolume environmental impact statements that concluded the pipeline would have “no significant impacts” on the environment. That should have ended the matter.

But the President’s environmentalist friends have decided to make Keystone a test of his green virtue. “We’ll see if [Mr. Obama] is an oil guy or a people guy,” eco-agitator Bill McKibben recently warned at an Occupy Wall Street event, and the Sierra Club has threatened that it won’t “mobilize the environmental base” in 2012 if he approves the project. Various Hollywood worthies have marched in front of the White House in protest.

[…]We’re guessing this decision to abdicate was really made by President Plouffe, as in David Plouffe, the White House political aide who seems to be running most of the executive branch these days. The Keystone cop-out couldn’t be a clearer expression that this Administration puts its anticarbon obsessions—and Big Green campaign donors—above job creation and blue-collar construction workers. He’s President of the 1%.

This reminds me of the way that Obama hurt the economy by delaying three free trade deals for three years, in order to appease his union supporters.

When Obama tries to create jobs, he ends up doing thinks like giving $535 million taxpayer dollars to Solyndra – to repay his Democrat fundraisers. And then they go bankrupt, because green energy is a hoax. The right way to create jobs is by letting businesses keep the money they earn, and keeping government out of their operations. Unfortunately, Obama doesn’t like it when people earn money by selling services and products, and he thinks that government needs to regulate businesses. So, we are stuck with high unemployment.

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E-mails reveal that Obama fundraiser discussed Solyndra loan with White House

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FBI agents remove evidence from Solyndra Headquarters
FBI agents remove evidence from Solyndra Headquarters

From the leftist Washington Post.

Excerpt:

A major donor to President Barack Obama discussed with White House officials a solar energy company that received a half-billion dollar federal loan and later went bankrupt, newly released emails show.

The emails released by a House committee appear to contradict repeated assurances by the Obama administration that the donor, George Kaiser, never talked about Solyndra Inc. with the White House.

Solyndra’s name came up at a White House meeting with Kaiser last year at a time when the California company was seeking a second federal loan, after it had already received a $528 million loan in 2009, the emails show.

The second loan was not approved. Instead, an investment venture controlled by Kaiser made a private loan that resulted in the firm and other investors moving ahead of taxpayers in line for repayment in case of a default by Solyndra.

Solyndra, the first renewable energy company to receive a federal loan under the 2009 stimulus law, declared bankruptcy in September and laid off its 1,100 workers, leaving taxpayers on the hook for more than a half-billion dollars.

The company’s implosion and revelations that administration officials rushed to complete the loan in time for a September 2009 groundbreaking have become an embarrassment for Obama and a rallying cry for GOP critics of his green energy program.

Kaiser, an Oklahoma billionaire, was a “bundler” for Obama’s 2008 campaign, raising between $50,000 and $100,000 for the president, records show. He also was a frequent White House visitor in 2009 and 2010. White House officials for months have denied that Kaiser talked about Solyndra during those visits. One the nation’s richest men, Kaiser owns an oil company and other energy interests and is chief donor to the George Kaiser Family Foundation, which invests in early childhood education and community health.

In one email released Wednesday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Kaiser said that when he and a foundation official visited the White House last year, officials showed “thorough knowledge of the Solyndra story, suggesting it was one their prime poster children” for renewable energy.

In another email, a Kaiser associate appears confident that Energy Secretary Steven Chu would approve a second loan for Solyndra.

“It appears things are headed in the right direction and Chu is apparently staying involved in Solyndra’s application and continues to talk up the company as a success story,” Steve Mitchell, managing director of Kaiser’s venture-capital firm, Argonaut Private Equity, wrote in a March 5, 2010, e-mail. Mitchell also served on Solyndra’s board of directors.

It’s very important for voters to understand what the Obama administration means when it talks about “jobs bills”, “shovel-ready projects”, “infrastructure development” and “economic stimulus”. What they mean by those words is giving taxpayer money to their campaign fundraisers. And that’s why the unemployment rate has been over 9% for the last three years, and we are running 1.3 trillion dollar deficits.

Do you know what Republicans would do if they were in office? They would let you keep more of the money you earn, and to hell with corruption. That’s what a tax cut is – more money for you, and less money for politicians. Think about it. The smaller the government, the less opportunity there is for this sort of greed and corruption.

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