Don’t worry about Fisker’s failures. Overall, clean-energy subsidies are working fine
Energy
Why Romney Is Polishing Energy’s Apple
On Tuesday night in Dallas, Mitt Romney made one thing clear: he was not “just polishing the apple for T. Boone Pickens here,” he said, when he began his policy remarks at a fundraiser with Pickens, an oil and gas investor, by talking about energy.
The truth is, as Romney pointed out, he almost always starts talking policy by …
A New Wind Blowing: Obama’s Clean-Energy Revolution
Before President Obama took office, the U.S. had 25 gigawatts of wind power, and the government’s “base case” energy forecast expected 40 GW by 2030. Well, it’s not quite 2030 yet, but we’ve already got 50 GW of wind. …
Why on Earth Would the Obama Campaign Call Solyndra ‘Successful and Innovative’? Because It Was.
In this cauldron of stupidity we call a presidential campaign, the scandal of the minute is Obama campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith’s description of Solyndra as “successful and innovative.” She actually said Solyndra was …
Obama Used His Power So That Future Storms Won’t Knock Out Your Power
The Beltway is always obsessed with power, but these days it’s particularly obsessed with power—not the power that gets wielded and exercised, but the power that gets generated and distributed, because it’s currently in short supply in Washington after a nasty storm. Suddenly, commentators on the right as well as the left are …
Mitt Romney’s Ads: Still Wrong on the Stimulus
I’ve been on leave writing a book about the stimulus, so I’ve let others judge the Pants-on-Fire ads and Four-Pinocchio attacks and Solyndra-related nonsense that Republicans have been peddling about the stimulus. It’s …
Can Photo Ops Lower Gas Prices? Stay Tuned.
“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 …
Gas Prices and the Big GOP Lie
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 to get oil and natural gas in this …
Should President Obama Tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?
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 …
Why Obama’s ‘All of the Above’ Energy Policy Won’t Ease Pain at the Pump
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 Obama during his …
President Obama—With Help from Bill Clinton—Pushes Energy Efficiency
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 …
Amid Endless Solyndra Smoke, Some New Signs Of Fire
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 round …
The President and the Pipeline
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.
