President Barack Obama spoke up for the economic interests of the little guy in his State of the Union speech to Congress on January 24th. On January 26th, the President spoke in Las Vegas about using taxpayer dollars to improve the economic well-being on one of those little guys in particular—Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens. He urged voters to support the Pickens Payoff Plan (officially titled the NAT GAS Act), a bipartisan bill sponsored in the Senate by Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and in the House by Representative John Sullivan (R-Okla.).
The bill, H. R. 1380 in the House and S. 1863 in the Senate, would provide huge new subsidies to buyers and users of heavy duty trucks that use natural gas. Pickens owns Clean Energy Fuels, which builds and runs natural gas service stations. He also has major investments in a number of companies in the natural gas industry. The value of these investments would probably increase by several billion dollars if the bill were enacted.
However, Pickens has been clear that he has spent $100 million “of his own money” to promote the Pickens Your Pocket legislation only out of love for his country. “I’m sure not doing this for the money,” he told the New York Times last May.
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President Obama’s record proves that he understands how to use time effectively, solely to his advantage. His craft of circumventing issues of critical national interest is an art form, and his State of the Union address is no exception. “This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy, a strategy that’s cleaner, cheaper and full of new jobs.” His hypocritical declaration was salt to the fresh wound inflicted by his dismissal of the $7 billion privately funded TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline just prior to the SOTU.
The following day, it became clear at the Subcommittee on Energy and Power hearing on Rep. Lee Terry’s (R-NE) The North American Energy Access Act (H.R. 3548), that political “timing” was the basis for Obama’s pipeline rejection. Kerri-Ann Jones, the Bureau of Oceans and International Environment Assistant Secretary of the State Department, was the witness who vouched for the State Dept’s recommendation that Obama kill the pipeline. She said that the merit of the project did not cause the second rejection; it was the lack of time given to finish the reviewing process of a new route. According to Jones, it normally takes 18-24 months to vet a project of this size; the KXL Pipeline, however, has now been under review for a total 40 months.
Solyndra, which disposed of $535 million of tax payer money, is the poster child of Obama’s hypocritical devotion to due diligence. Before rushing Solyndra’s subsidy out the door, Obama’s DOE blatantly ignored countless red flags regarding the viability of their first green energy flagship of government funding. When Solyndra went belly-up, laying off more than 1,100 workers, the Obama administration wanted to get the timing right. Emails from the Argonaut Private Equity, an investment firm owned by Solyndra’s largest investor and Obama campaign donor George Kaiser, indicate that the DOE asked Solyndra to postpone the announcement of job layoffs until after the 2010 midterm elections. How convenient.
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In October last year, CEI’s Jackie Moreau blogged about victims of EPA’s wetland regulatory regime. “The once lovely face of Lady Liberty,” she wrote, “now wears the quintessential looks of the mean kid on the playground: class bully.” In this excerpt from Mugged by the State: Outrageous Government Assaults on Ordinary People and their Property, Randall Fitzgerald reinforces her point with some more outrageous examples of government environmentalism out-of-control.
Mugged by the State was released in 2003
As James Knott sat at his desk talking on the telephone on the morning of November 7, 1997, he noticed a police officer strolling across the lobby of Riverdale Mills, the wire-mesh manufacturing plant Knott owned in Northbridge, Massachusetts. Seconds later, twenty armed federal, state, and local law enforcement officers swarmed through the lobby and began entering employee’s offices.
Knott rushed out into the lobby and found himself confronted by a man wearing a dark jacket emblazoned with the lettering US AGENT. “We are here to seize some records,” the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officer announced. “I have a warrant from a United States federal judge.”
After reading over this warrant, the sixty-nine-year-old Knott gave his consent for the search, though he sternly warned the EPA agents, “I am sure someone has perjured themselves to obtain such a warrant from a judge.”
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So much for consensus.
For years, climate change cultists have attempted to shut down public discourse over global warming by assuring us that “the debate is over,” that scientists are in lockstep agreement that Man is steam-frying his own planet.
That was always bunk, of course. For one, if the scientific debate was really over, no one would have to say it. There just wouldn’t be any debate. No one these days goes around saying “the debate is over” about heliocentrism. That’s because no one questions the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun – there is literally no debate.
Second, the fact that it was so often politicians and/or celebrities (or a bizarre hybrid of the two like Al Gore) intoning the “debate is over” canard, instead of actual scientists, was a major clue that something was amiss with the “consensus” claim.
(The Washington Post famously reported on Gore’s scientific acumen: “For all of Gore’s later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received that sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6…and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year.”)
Sadly for Gore et al, a growing number of scientists are publically expressing skepticism about anthropogenic global warming, emboldened by a flood of new data that casts doubt on the whole “climate change” paradigm (I address some of this new data in my latest piece for the Washington Examiner).
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Bier family members—Dan and Jerry—blogged notable responses to Obama’s State of the Union energy policy recommendations this week. Over at Speak With Authority, Jerry (my uncle) points out that while the president mentioned “renewable” and “clean” energy, the president was light on details like the Department of Energy’s proposed volcano energy project in Oregon. Jerry writes, “Of all the recent ideas for developing new sources of energy, this volcano project is the one that sounds most like some junior high school boys pouring all the chemicals in the science lab into one beaker just to ‘see what will happen.’”
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Earlier this week, Stimulus beneficiary Evergreen
I foresaw this spate of bad news last November. As I explained yesterday,
In a previous post, I compared renewable energy spending in the 2009 Stimulus to a green albatross burdening the President. I argued that Stimulus spending was inherently wasteful, because politics invariably corrupts government’s investment decisions. The result is taxpayers losses on bankrupt companies that existed only by the grace of political favoritism, a la Solyndra. I predicted the green stimulus would haunt the President, in the form of a slow drip public relations nightmare, as a litany of bad investments go belly-up in the run up to the 2012 elections.
Mr. President, are you still sure you want to “double down” on renewable energy giveaways?
In January 2010, Ener1, a manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries for use in plug-in electric cars, received a $118.5 million Stimulus grant from the US Department of Energy. Today, it filed for bankruptcy. Their Chapter 11 filing lists around $100 million each in assets and debts and proposes a restructuring plan to reduce its debt and provide up to $81 million to recapitalize the company.
The bankruptcy follows in the footsteps of Solyndra ($535 million from the DOE), Beacon Power ($43 million from the DOE) and SpectraWatt ($500,000 from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), all government-subsidized green energy companies which collapsed within the last year.
Ener1 cites heavy competition from Asia, a rough economy, bad investments and the slowly developing electric car market for its failure. Even though Asia may have a cheaper workforce and more relaxed labor laws, the repeated failures of federally-backed green industry corporations—which according to CBS, will perhaps total 11 bankruptcies in the near future—is due to the Obama administration’s unrealistic insistence on creating a green energy industry out of subsidies, particularly when the demand for “green” products is virtually non-existent in the real marketplace.
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At a hearing Wednesday morning, GOP members of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs opined that General Motors (GM) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) colluded to withhold information from the public about battery fires in the Chevy Volt, the plug-in hybrid car lavishly subsidized by the Obama administration as part of its bailout of the auto industry, the Washington Post reports.
NHTSA began to investigate the green car’s safety risk in June after a test car caught fire, but waited until November to inform the public. Subcommittee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) called the delay “deeply troubling,” particularly because the Government owns 26.5% of GM shares and an expanding market for electric vehicles is critical to the administration’s plan to raise fuel economy standards to 54.5 mpg.
“Strickland,” says the Post, “insisted there was no connection and said he had not been pressured by anyone from the administration on the investigation.” So why the delay?
Strickland said he would have gone public immediately if there were an imminent safety risk. He said it would have been irresponsible to tell people that something was wrong with the Volt while experts looked into the cause of the fire.
“I hear you. I don’t believe you,” said full Committee Chair Rep. Darrell E. Issa (R-Calif.). Issa has good reason to be skeptical. [click to continue…]
President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address hitched its wagon to the 99 percent. The speech was rife with populist rhetoric, of which the following is only one example:
We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.
This morning, less than 48 hours removed from his defense of the little guy, the President gave a speech in Nevada during which he championed…H.R. 1380, the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act (a.k.a., the NAT GAS Act, a.k.a., “The T. Boone Pickens Earmark Bill,” a.k.a., the “Pickens-Your-Pocket Boondoggle Bill”), legislation that was manufactured by billionaire T. Boone Pickens in order to make himself even richer. The bill would subsidize the use of natural gas as a fuel for the transportation sector, in particular for the trucking industry. Pickens is a gas tycoon, and it goes without saying that legislation to increase demand for gas is good for his bottom line.
By throwing his weight behind this Billionaire’s Bailout, President Obama exposed the vapidity of his SOTU commitment to an America where “everyone plays by the same rules.” The NAT GAS Act was written by billionaires, for billionaires.
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