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“No matter what happens to America,” the satirical pundit Stephen Colbert once observed, “She will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo-ops in the world.” And so Barack Obama stood before a bunch of big pipes today in Cushing, Oklahoma, to announce that he was expediting a process that is already on the fast [...]
To hear the Republican presidential candidates tell it, President Obama is doing all he can — shy of changing the price signs at your local Mobil station — to raise the cost of gasoline. Last week Mitt Romney told Fox News that Obama “has done everything in his power to make it harder for us [...]
Barack Obama likes to say that as President of the United States, he doesn’t “bluff” when it comes to foreign policy. But when it comes to energy, it looks like Obama might be willing to try the occasional fake out. On Thursday, Reuters reported Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron discussed the possibility of [...]
I have a brilliant idea that will solve the nation’s energy problem. We need to invest in a massive research program—I mean Apollo Project-sized—to invent a silver bullet. Because all I keep hearing is that we’re all waiting for a silver bullet to solve our energy woes, if only we could find one. Take President [...]
It’s been tough going in the renewable energy business lately. Prices for solar panels have fallen drastically, which is good news for consumers, but not so good for solar manufacturers, who are struggling to survive. Some—like the much-maligned Solyndra, which went down earlier this year after receiving more than $500 million in government loan guarantees—won’t [...]
Another week, another disconcerting e-mail dump to push the Solyndra scandal deeper into the history books as an example of why industrial policy in the United States tends to go badly. According to newly released emails, the former Solyndra CEO Brian Harrison told officials at the Department of Energy that he wanted to announce a [...]
President Barack Obama told an Omaha news program on Tuesday that he will make the final decision whether to permit construction of the proposed $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline, and whether to require that it be routed away from the Ogallala aquifer, which supplies 2 million people in the plains states with drinking water.
The talented Mike Grunwald laid out the case yesterday for quarantining Solyndra from the rest of the solar effort. Just because Solyndra’s model failed, he says, doesn’t mean the rest of the push to fund innovation in renewable energy while simultaneously creating much-needed jobs is corrupt or doomed to failure. It’s really not my area, [...]
Nobody’s going to care that all successful loan programs have failures, that the Solyndra venture was barely 1% of the Energy Department’s $40 billion clean-energy portfolio, that there will still be over $2 billion in reserves for busted loans no matter how Solyndra shakes out. That’s politics.
The news that President Obama has authorized the release of 30 million barrels of oil from the gulf coast caverns that hold America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve came in an unusual way. In the past, when a president has taken the extraordinary step of tapping the SPR, as it’s known, he has done so to maximum [...]
