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A123: another green energy company goes bankrupt after getting stimulus money

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Note: Don’t forget about the debate tonight at 9 Eastern/6 Pacific. Watch out for CNN moderator bias and planted questions though!

From the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

Mitt Romney just got more fodder to attack Barack Obama’s green energy programs ahead of Tuesday night’s presidential debate.

A123 Systems Inc., which was awarded a federal grant of $249 million funded by the 2009 economic-stimulus law, filed for bankruptcy protection Tuesday morning.

The company, a maker of electric vehicle batteries, received accolades from the president in September 2010. “This is important not just because of what you guys are doing at your plant, but all across America,” Mr. Obama said in a phone call timed to the opening of a battery manufacturing facility. “Because this is about the birth of an entire new industry in America — an industry that’s going to be central to the next generation of cars.”

Energy Secretary Steven Chu in 2009 said the company was “one of the success stories of a high-technology company that was funded with government funds” and “the model of what we want to happen in the future on a bigger scale.”

The Romney campaign has attacked Mr. Obama for what it says is ill-advised government spending on risky clean-energy start-ups. In last week’s vice presidential debate, Paul Ryan called the stimulus program “green pork.”

Newsbusters adds this update:

From Bloomberg’s report today:

President Barack Obama called A123 Chief Executive Officer David Vieau and then-Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm during a September 2010 event celebrating the opening of the plant in Livonia, Michigan, that the company received the U.S. grant to help build.

“This is about the birth of an entire new industry in America — an industry that’s going to be central to the next generation of cars,” Obama said in the phone call, according to a transcript provided by the White House. “When folks lift up their hoods on the cars of the future, I want them to see engines and batteries that are stamped: Made in America.”

I’m hoping that in tonight’s debate Romney reasserts that line about the $90 billion wasted on green projects and a lot of it linked to Obama campaign fundraisers.

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New study: there has been no global warming since 1997

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Newest climate data: no change in temperatures since 1997
Newest climate data: no change in temperatures since 1997

Reported in the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.

The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.

This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.

The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued  quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported.

This stands in sharp contrast  to the release of the previous  figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year.

Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased.

[…]The regular data collected on global temperature is called Hadcrut 4, as it is jointly issued by the Met Office’s Hadley Centre and Prof Jones’s Climatic Research Unit.

How much has all the hype about global warming cost the British taxpayer?

Your bills are going up, at least in part, because of the array of ‘green’ subsidies being provided to the renewable energy industry, chiefly wind.

They will cost the average household about £100 this year. This is set to rise steadily higher – yet it  is being imposed for only one  reason: the widespread conviction, which is shared by politicians of all stripes and drilled into children at primary schools, that, without drastic action to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, global warming is certain soon to accelerate, with truly catastrophic consequences by the end of the century – when temperatures could be up to five degrees higher.

Hence the significance of those first two answers. Global industrialisation over the past 130 years has made relatively little difference.

And with the country committed by Act of Parliament to reducing CO2 by 80 per cent by 2050, a project that will cost hundreds of billions, the news that the world has got no warmer for the past 16 years comes as something of a shock.

Across the pond in the United States, we are not only paying more for electricity because of energy taxes and energy regulations, but we are also losing blue collar jobs, as the Daily Caller explains:

Coal company Alpha Natural Resources announced Tuesday it would be laying off 1,200 workers and closing eight coal mines to face two new challenges: cheap natural gas and “a regulatory environment that’s aggressively aimed at constraining the use of coal.”

The Associated Press reports that the company is cutting production by 16 million tons and 1,200 jobs nationwide, with 400 layoffs occurring immediately by closing coal mines in Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Four mines will be closed in West Virginia, another three will be closed in Virginia and one in Pennsylvania. All the mines are non-union operations, according to the AP.

Not only that, but the Wall Street Journal just reported that Obama banned oil drilling on 11.5 million acres of federal land:

President Obama is campaigning as a champion of the oil and gas boom he’s had nothing to do with, and even as his regulators try to stifle it. The latest example is the Interior Department’s little-noticed August decision to close off from drilling nearly half of the 23.5 million acre National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.

The area is called the National Petroleum Reserve because in 1976 Congress designated it as a strategic oil and natural gas stockpile to meet the “energy needs of the nation.” Alaska favors exploration in nearly the entire reserve. The feds had been reviewing four potential development plans, and the state of Alaska had strongly objected to the most restrictive of the four. Sure enough, that was the plan Interior chose.

That kind of thing, along with blocking the Keystone XL pipeline, explains why gas prices are so high, and why we have no energy jobs being created. They are being created in Brazil, China and elsewhere, but not here. Why would anyone create jobs here when corporate taxes and regulations eat up profits? If the USA is worried so much about global warming, then they don’t want jobs and they don’t want lower electricity prices. You can’t have everything at once.

This is all according to plan, as Obama explained:

Higher energy prices and bankrupting coal plants is how Obama planned to deal with “global warming”. That was one of his top priorities as President. Only there was no global warming. That was just an excuse by left-wing academic charlatans to get more grant money for their universities by extracting it from the private sector businesses and workers. The government went along with it because they wanted control of business, and a legitimate looking way of paying off their campaign fundraisers, as with Solyndra. That’s all global warming was. It was a hoax designed to achieve a more socialist economy why rewarding Democrat donors.

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The ten worst energy policies of the Obama administration

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Heritage Foundation put this list together.

Here are a few examples:

5) The EPA’s Regulatory Train Wreck: The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ream of new regulations will adversely affect existing power plants, requiring them to be retrofitted or in many cases shut down because it will be too costly to install emission-reduction controls The most recent announcement of the President’s ongoing campaign against carbon-based fuel, the EPA released a new rule to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants, which would effectively ban new coal power plants, as its emissions standards are too low to be met by conventional coal-fired facilities. That will result in higher energy costs, fewer jobs, a less prosperous economy and no discernible difference in global temperatures.

6) Cap-and-Trade and the Clean Energy Standard: When he came into office, President Obama latched on to the notion of cap-and-trade — a system of energy taxes and credits designed to reduce carbon emissions. The end result would have been disastrous for American businesses and the economy. When that legislation failed, the President proposed a Clean Energy Standard mandating that the power industry  meet government-determined goals with respect to renewable energy production. The effect, though, is the same.  Both serve as a draconian energy tax that burdens businesses and consumers – with no environmental benefits.

8) Terminating the Nuclear Waste Repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.  The Obama Administration   says it wants to pursue nuclear power, but its rhetoric does not match its nuclear policy.  Its decision to abandon the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project without any technical or scientific data is a case in point.  With nearly $15 billion spent on the project, the data indicates that Yucca would be a safe place to store America’s used nuclear fuel.  Yet purely for political reasons the Obama administration decided to terminate the program without having anything to replace it. Absent any nuclear waste disposal options, the United States simply will not significantly expand nuclear energy.

9) Green Jobs Stimulus: With the U.S. economy struggling to recover from a recession, President Obama turned to a trillion dollars in stimulus spending in an attempt to spend America out of the economic doldrums. A significant part of that stimulus was directed toward a new “green” economy with taxpayer dollars directed toward creating alternative energy jobs. Obama promised to create five million green jobs over 10 years. The trouble is that his plan didn’t work, and the jobs didn’t materialize. As The New York Times reported, it was nothing more than “a pipe dream.” Further, these are taxpayer-funded jobs that destroy jobs elsewhere in the economy. When the government gives money to build a windmill, for example, those resources cannot simultaneously be used to build other products. The net effect is job and income losses.

10) Job-Killing CAFE Standards: Obama’s EPA has imposed a corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standard requiring auto makers to hit an average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025—a 40 percent reduction in fuel consumption compared to today. The Center for Automotive Research warned that overly stringent standards could add $10,000 to the cost of a new car, decreasing sales and thereby reducing production, destroying as many as 220,000 jobs, according to a report by the Defour Group. And a 2002 National Academy of Sciences study concludes that CAFE’s downsizing effect makes cars less safe and contributed to between 1,300 and 2,600 deaths in a single representative year.

Do you wonder why the unemployment rate is more than double what it was in during the Bush administration? Or why we are running deficits four times higher than what we had in the Bush administration? Or why gas prices have tripled compared to what they were under the Bush administration? Well, when you look at a list like this, you will realize that it is all the deliberate result of incompetence in policy making by the Obama administration. They did everything wrong, and now we are paying the price for it.