Free Republic

WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. (AP) — Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly once again has vetoed money to fund a commission aimed at developing green jobs. Shelly says legislation that created the Green Economy Commission doesn’t set guidelines on how it would work with the tribe’s executive branch, which has similar goals. He also says the commission is supposed to seek outside funding.

A new book by Hoover Institution fellow Peter Schweizer details the startling extent of the cronyism that has pervaded President Obama’s “green jobs” push. According to Schweizer, 4 out of every 5 renewable energy companies backed by the Energy Department was “run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers.” Those companies’ “political largesse is probably the best investment they ever made in alternative energy,” Schweizer explains. “It brought them returns many times over.” Such is the inevitable consequence of large government interventions in private markets. Leaving aside the losses associated with transfers of funds from self-sustaining industries to ones...

The Fisker Karma electric car, developed mainly with your tax money so that a bunch of rich VC’s wouldn’t have to risk any real money, has rolled out with an nominal EPA MPGe of 52. Not bad? Unfortunately, it’s a sham. This figure is calculated using the grossly flawed EPA process that substantially underestimates the amount of fossil fuels required to power the electric car, as I showed in great depth in an earlier Forbes.com article. In short, the EPA methodology leaves out, among other things, the conversion efficiency in generating the electricity from fossil fuels in the first place....

WASHINGTON -- A tiny car company backed by former Vice President Al Gore has just gotten a $529 million U.S. government loan to help build a hybrid sports car in Finland that will sell for about $89,000. The award this week to California startup Fisker Automotive Inc. follows a $465 million government loan to Tesla Motors Inc., purveyors of a $109,000 British-built electric Roadster. Tesla is a California startup focusing on all-electric vehicles, with a number of celebrity endorsements that is backed by investors that have contributed to Democratic campaigns The awards to Fisker and Tesla have prompted concern from...

Barack Obama has spared no effort attempting to shove the US towards a so-called "green economy." The same green economy nearly bankrupted Spain and has been nothing but a miserable failure here. China is now in the process of changing the sticker price of Obama's green economy and they are sending it skyward. They are tightening control of rare Earth metals.The kind used in pretty much everything Obama is trying shove down our throats. BEIJING — In the name of fighting pollution, China has sent the price of compact fluorescent light bulbs soaring in the United States. By closing or...

A green jobs program in one of America's greenest cities is being called a bust 16 months after a $20 million federal grant to weatherize homes in Seattle ended up putting just 14 people to work in mostly administrative jobs and upgrading only three homes in the area. "The jobs are not there," Todd Myers, who wrote the book "Eco Fads," told Fox News. "So we're training people for jobs that don't exist." Seattle is not alone. The Department of Energy has allocated $508 million to 41 states for its Better Buildings Neighborhood Program and 600 jobs have been created...

Las Vegas, NV – Nevada Senator Harry Reid today announced a $4,650,523 million grant for three electric buses in Reno that will travel from the Riverwalk District to the University of Nevada, Reno.  The Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County will receive the funding for three 35-foot composite-body electric buses that will replace three diesel buses. “These clean buses will extend the life of Reno’s downtown bus system for years to come, which is good news for tourists, college students and Nevadans commuting to and from work,” Reid said.  “The electric buses are designed for efficiency in Northern Nevada’s high...

“Solon Corp will stop manufacturing solar panels in Tucson by mid-October, ending the facility’s three-year run,” reports the Phoenix Business Journal. “The company will lay off about 60 employees when it shuts down that part of the Tucson operation. It was the state’s first solar panel production line.” In another blow to the so-called solar power industry, the Boston Herald also reports, “Evergreen Solar Inc., the Massachusetts clean-energy company that received millions in state subsidies from the Patrick administration for an ill-fated Bay State factory, has filed for bankruptcy, listing $485.6 million in debt.” The so-called green scheme was criticized...

Failed Policy: The Obama administration's jobs plan was based on a greening of the economy. But the green jobs aren't materializing, a fact driven home by the recent bankruptcy of a solar power company. During the 2008 campaign, candidate Barack Obama said he would create 5 million well-paying "green" jobs within 10 years. Politico has reported that "he's spent considerable time since entering the White House trying to make that happen." Indeed he has, though there has been no payoff. Yet he refuses give up on his quixotic quest. Last week Obama toured to much fanfare a Johnson Controls plant...

Last year, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced the city had won a coveted $20 million federal grant to invest in weatherization. McGinn had joined Vice President Joe Biden in the White House to make it. It came on the eve of Earth Day. It had heady goals: creating 2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000 homes in poorer neighborhoods. But more than a year later, Seattle's numbers are lackluster. As of last week, only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program. Many of the jobs are administrative, and not the entry-level...

Should energy consumers pay extra taxes to fund government-mandated and subsidized renewable energy technologies? "Absolutely yes," says John Bryson, President Obama's nominee for Commerce Secretary. He made the remark at a meeting of the Commonwealth Club of California in 2009 and went on to extol the virtues of hidden rates in California, a state encumbered with some of the nation's highest electricity and unemployment rates. Bryson, retired CEO of the electric utility Southern California Edison (SCE) and its parent company Edison International, excused the practice, saying, "That's been a part of the regulatory environment for the investor-owned utilities for as...

President Barack Obama on Thursday toured a vehicle battery plant in Michigan, touting his administration’s focus on green technology and jobs, at a corporation where federal money authorized by the economic stimulus law that Obama signed at the beginning of his presidency had created "green" jobs at a cost of about $2 million in federal subsidies per job. Obama told the employees of Johnson Controls Inc., in Holland, Mich., gathered at the factory that they represented how America can come out of a recession by making products that can be sold around the world. The Obama administration announced this week...

A Salinas car manufacturing company that was expected to build environmentally friendly electric cars and create new jobs folded before almost any cars 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. The start-up company set up shop in Salinas in the summer of 2009 after the city gave Ryan a $300,000 community development grant. When the company still ran into financial trouble last year, the city...

The bulb is back. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R.,Mich.) has finally agreed to support a bill this summer that means lights out on the looming 2012 ban on the incandescent light bulb. Upton himself co-sponsored 2007 legislation making light bulbs illegal, a ban that has become a symbol of bipartisan Big Government run amok. Upton has come under increased pressure in recent weeks, sources say, after failing to follow up on a promise he made after assuming the committee chairmanship that he would hold hearings on reversing the ban. After months of paralysis — and with...

Flint, a city where more than half the children live below the poverty level, lost out on a pair of $1.1 million electric buses that the federal stimulus program would have paid for when the “green technology” company making them went out of business. So now, the head of the Flint bus authority says they are trying to get a new hydrogen-powered bus that comes with a $2.5 million sticker price, more than eight times the cost of a traditional diesel bus. Ed Benning, general manager of Flint’s Mass Transportation Authority, said in an email that MTA has been discussing...

American Electric Power on Thursday announced it plans to shut down several coal-fired power plants, convert or retrofit others, and cut as many as 600 jobs in the next few years to comply with regulations proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Based on the proposed regulations, AEP will have to retire nearly 6,000 megawatts of coalfueled power generation; upgrade or install new advanced emissions reduction equipment on another 10,100 megawatts; refuel 1,070 megawatts of coal generation as 932 megawatts of natural gas capacity; and build 1,220 megawatts of natural gas-fueled generation.

IN April, Gov. Jerry Brown made headlines by signing into law an ambitious mandate that requires California to obtain one-third of its electricity from renewable energy sources like sunlight and wind by 2020. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia now have renewable electricity mandates. President Obama and several members of Congress have supported one at the federal level. Polls routinely show strong support among voters for renewable energy projects — as long as they don’t cost too much. But there’s the rub: while energy sources like sunlight and wind are free and naturally replenished, converting them into large quantities...

Brian Williams has dreamed of working in the solar field ever since he first heard about it in the 1970s. So when a new green job training program arrived in his hometown of Ocala, Fla., Williams, now 53, signed up immediately. The program – one of many around the country -- is funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and geared toward helping unemployed workers, low-income individuals, high school dropouts or people with criminal records. When he joined one year ago, Williams was unemployed. During his training at Workforce Connection, a non-profit organization in Ocala, he learned basic skills,...

CBS News' Mark Knoller reports via Twitter on Obama statement at one of the three New York City fundraisers he headlined this evening:"They're making enough profit," says Obama of big oil companies, calling for their $4billion in tax breaks/subsidies to be eliminated.Obama said "we can do a lot" with the $4-billlion in oil company tax breaks. Said US should invest in energy of the future, not the past.

http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2011/04/bonneville_power_administratio_2.html The Bonneville Power Administration wants to shut down Northwest wind farms this spring when hydroelectric dams are generating plenty of electricity as a huge mountain snowpack melts. The Portland-based BPA may have to limit production from wind farms to free space in the regional power grid, The Seattle Times reported Wednesday.

President Barack Obama says shifting the U.S. away from imported oil and toward cleaner forms of energy will add momentum to a trend that has led to 1.8 million new jobs in the past 13 months. Obama used his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday to promote his ideas for bringing down gasoline prices by decreasing U.S. dependence on foreign oil. A blueprint he outlined in a recent speech calls for increasing domestic oil exploration and production, making cars and trucks more energy efficient and building vehicles that run on alternative fuels or electricity.

Peruse Chevrolet's February sales release, and you'll notice one number that's blatantly missing: the number of Chevy Volts sold. The number – a very modest 281 – is available in the company's detailed data (PDF), but it certainly isn't something that GM wants to highlight, apparently. Keeping the number quiet is a bit understandable, since it's lower than the 321 that Chevy sold in January. Nissan doesn't have anything to brag about here, either (and it didn't avoiding any mention of the Leaf sales in its press release). Why? Well, back in January, the company sold 87 Leafs. In February?...

President Barack Obama and US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner sought to downplay fears that unrest in the Middle East would negatively impact the US economy by hailing a Virginia man’s invention of a rainbow-making machine as a harbinger of a brighter future for America. The device is the brainchild of Michael Jones McKean, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. It uses a large scale sprinkler system and the light of the sun to create rainbows averaging about 1,000 feet in length. Each device can produce a rainbow of 15 minute duration twice a day. A prototype is currently being...

.Not surprisingly, vegetarians and environmentalists have largely downplayed the historical record of Nazi Germany’s green streak. Some have been quick to point out that Hitler apparently cheated on occasion with ham, sausage, and seafood dishes. Hitler was also inconsistent with regard to environmental preservationist values and practices, largely because of the need to place Germany on an all out war footing throughout the 1930’s in a vast economy busting arms buildup. Hitler was also a fond of grand building projects National Socialism style and was planning on exploiting the natural resources in the East as much as possible to win...

Using some of the remaining stimulus funds, President Obama is allocating $2 billion to be used for solar plant construction. It is a great program and my only qualm is that it should be significantly expanded so we can truly create a green economy and green energy production, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. ..... This is merely a microcosm of what we could be doing. While I tend to be fiscally conservative, I’m not opposed to spending money when there is a good investment to be made and so long as that investment is paid for. Programs like these...

We learned again in the president’s speech on the BP disaster this week that all of our interests in the energy sphere are aligned: Move from carbon-based fuel to renewables and we’ll create American jobs, heal the climate, put more distance between us and geopolitically unstable regions and punish those nasty oil companies while saving our shrimp and seagulls. Win-win-win-win-win. Except the president’s beloved (if doomed) cap-and-trade legislation would: do little or nothing to alter global climate trends, reward oil companies like BP that backed the bill from the start, destroy jobs by increasing the cost gap with coal-powered China...

Big news [PDF] from España: “Spain admits that the green economy sold to Obama is a ruin.� The story goes on to note that President Obama has cited Spain as an exemplar of an ecologically sound energy economy no fewer than eight times. As I have repeatedly noted in this space — with the able assistance of Spanish economist Gabriel Calzada – for every green job created by the Iberian nation’s massive investment in renewable energy, that transfer of wealth to uneconomic activities cost the economy 2.2 jobs in opportunity cost, as well as direct job losses thanks to the increased...

Following PJM's exclusive story on a leaked Spanish government report, a newspaper in Spain confirms that the country's "green economy" policies — the model for the Obama administration's "green jobs" efforts — have been a disaster: expensive, ineffective, and unworkable. (An English translation of the Spanish article is provided in this post.)As predicted was inevitable, today the Spanish newspaper La Gaceta runs with a full-page article fessing up to the truth about Spain’s “green jobs” boondoggle, which happens to be the one naively cited by President Obama no less than eight times as his model for the United States. It is now...

NEW YORK (AFP) – The planet is overheating, under-resourced, and almost out of time, but technical innovation and green economics could save the world, experts and leaders Thursday told an international conference here. Video-linked panels in New York, Monaco, Mexico City, Beijing, London, Nairobi and New Delhi painted an alarming picture of global poverty and environmental degradation. They called on the United States and other rich countries to show leadership, for example by investing in carbon capture technology and other long-term methods of reducing greenhouse gasses. But developing countries, where pollution is growing rapidly, can also play a big role...

Are you paying for renewable energy, or just a bunch of hot air? snip . . . Consumers need to understand that the electricity "is not going from the windmill on the ridge to your toaster," says Pacific Power spokesman Tom Gauntt. Michael Gillenwater, a Princeton researcher who codeveloped the EPA's carbon emissions tracking system, says it's more like donating to a cause. "What you are doing is subsidizing the market for renewable energy."

Leadership: Alaska's ex-governor asks a question we'd like answered: Why is California's current governor pushing the same policies in Copenhagen that helped drive his state into record deficits and unemployment? The movie series that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a household name involved cyborgs traveling through time to alternately try to destroy or save one John Connor, who would grow up to be the leader of the resistance against a race of machines that ruled the planet. Prominent in the series was his tough cookie of a mom, Sarah Connor. Another Sarah has taken the lead in another resistance against another group...

fter Arnold Schwarzenegger criticized Sarah Palin’s stance on global warming yesterday, few thought it would take long for Palin to respond. She launched a broadside on her Facebook page, and reminded California’s governor that the “grain of salt” the Governator recommended should be taken with economic advice from the leader of a state in free-fall and unable to budget its money properly. Even if the world is warming, it doesn’t mean that the warming is either anthropogenic or catastrophic — and conservation doesn’t mean killing the economy: Why is Governor Schwarzenegger pushing for the same sorts of policies in Copenhagen...

Climate: As alternate-energy champ Spain's green economy slides into recession, a German professor says if American "climate illiterates" don't follow, the Copenhagen climate conference will fail. And the bad news is? King Canute, the Viking king of England, Norway and Denmark, was the legendary king whose sycophantic followers praised his power and wisdom. As the story goes, he once stood on the shore and commanded the waves to halt. Rather than exercising his ego, he in fact was giving his followers a lesson in reality — the power of man over nature is finite and inconsequential. In December, the world's...

Minnesota has been an unofficial testing ground for using ethanol to fuel vehicles, but after years of steady increases, interest appears to be waning. Despite a push from the governor and an increase in the number of so-called flexible-fuel vehicles on the road — which can run on either gasoline or a mostly ethanol blend — sales of E85 have dipped in recent months, beyond the normal decline in winter months. In February, sales of E85, a cleaner-burning fuel consisting of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, hit their lowest mark since 2006, according to a new report by...

Regulation: Ignoring the first rule of holes, a bankrupt state passing out IOUs welcomes an EPA waiver allowing it to further kill its economy. Too bad the state can't stop the air pollution imported from a growing China. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday granted California its long-standing request — denied by the Bush administration — for a waiver to allow it to impose even more stringent air pollution rules than currently required by the federal government.The way is now clear for implementation of a 2002 state law requiring new cars to increase their fuel economy 40% by 2016....

Recession: Polls show Americans care most about jobs right now, and couldn't care less about global warming. So why does the economic stimulus plan attempt to marry the two?In Washington, there's a breathless rush to turn the economy around by greening it. But are "green-collar" jobs and green infrastructure really the jobs and industries of the future that our "brilliant" new economic planners claim? Most Americans don't seem to think so. According to the latest Pew Research poll, they rank the "economy" and "jobs" as the nation's top two priorities. The "environment" stood 16th out of 20, and "global warming"...

CHARLOTTE, VT. — Dave Matthews Band announced today that it has arranged for NativeEnergy and Clean Air-Cool Planet to offset 100 percent of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from all of its touring activities since 1991. By offsetting the CO2 pollution that touring activities, such as transporting gear, powering stages and air travel generate, Dave Matthews Band is taking a proactive role in fighting global warming and helping Native America begin to restore sustainable homeland economies in balance with the Earth. This announcement comes at the beginning of Dave Matthews Band 2006 summer tour, which kicked off on May 30th...