War for the Future

Solyndra: it sounds like the name of a new supermodel, or perhaps a new drug you see commercials for on TV that spend half their time telling you about the strokes, liver failure and suicidal depressions you might get if you take it.  But Solyndra is a company that makes solar panels, that has gone bankrupt despite a half million from the federal government, support that began in the Bush administration but was touted by the Obama White House in their green jobs initiatives.  And so it's the toast of Fox News, and has led to congressional hearings and apparent perp walks for executives who invoked the fifth amendment.

Joe Nocera in the New York Times calls it a phony scandal.  He asserts that despite the bad images, neither of the executives has done "anything remotely illegal."  Nor had the company.  Their business failure, he asserts, has everything to do with the drop in prices of solar panels (which they built), largely because China is in this business in a big way.  With not enough big customers and no new investors, the business failed:

"Harrison and Stover are on the hot seat. Anything they say in their defense — even an off-hand remark — can and will be used against them. Their lawyers would be fools if they didn’t insist that their clients take the Fifth Amendment.
Do the Republicans know this? Of course. Do they care? Of course not. For an hour and a half on Friday morning, they peppered the two men with questions about this “taxpayer ripoff,” as Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, described it, knowing full well that Harrison and Stover would invoke their constitutional right to remain silent. Joe McCarthy would have been proud. The purpose of the hearing — indeed, the point of manufacturing a Solyndra investigation in the first place — is to embarrass the president."

It's all about anti-Obama politics, and it's all economically self-destructive:  "Over all, the American solar industry is a big success story; it now employs more people than either steel or coal, and it’s a net exporter.  But solar panel manufacturing — a potential source of middle-class jobs, and an important reason the White House was so high on Solyndra, which made its panels in Fremont, Calif. — is another story. Not so long ago, China made 6 percent of the world’s solar panels. Now it makes 54 percent, and leads the world in solar panel manufacturing. Needless to say, the U.S. share of the market has shrunk. The only way America can manufacture competitive solar panels is to come up with innovative technologies that the Chinese can’t replicate. Like, for instance, Solyndra’s."

So did the Obama administration do something wrong in backing this company?  Nocera says no:
" But if we could just stop playing gotcha for a second, we might realize that federal loan programs — especially loans for innovative energy technologies — virtually require the government to take risks the private sector won’t take. Indeed, risk-taking is what these programs are all about. Sometimes, the risks pay off. Other times, they don’t. It’s not a taxpayer ripoff if you don’t bat 1.000; on the contrary, a zero failure rate likely means that the program is too risk-averse." 

He asks whether the risk was worth taking in the case of Solyndra, and he concludes that it was, because of the industry's potential, economically for America, and ecologically for the planet's future.

GOPer zealots don't seem to care about America winning its future, if there's a chance Obama might get some of the credit.  They want to cut green jobs support.  But as Nocera points out:  the real winner isn’t the American taxpayer or even the House Republicans. It’s the Chinese solar industry."

Meanwhile, besides providing a complete timeline and description of the Solyandra situation,  Climate Progress highlights conclusions of a Brookings Report that the rest of the media is busy getting wrong, concerning the larger impact of green jobs.  For example: there are currently 2.7 million green jobs in the U.S. and the number is growing.  It is a growing sector of the American economy that cuts across all industries and occupations, and encompasses jobs requiring different skills--they aren't all college degree jobs.  And while particular segments that have green jobs have been hurt by the Great Recession,  the overall Green Economy grew during it. 

Which I guess is another reason GOPers hate it so much.  They're only for the "Job Creators" in fossil fuel industries, like the Koch Brothers---whose net worth went up by 40% in the past year to a combined $50 billion (more than the GNP of a number of entire countries, as Rachel Maddow pointed out),  while their companies have shed tens of thousands of American jobs.  With "job creators" like them, this country's economy is doomed.  Unless you count the highly paid p.r. firms and lobbyists they finance, and all their political influence peddling to make sure they make more billions for the rest of their brief lives, regardless of the consequences for the American middle class of now, and the future--no, let's say it right--The Future, because their financing of Climate Crisis disinformation is potentially that consequential.  The Future, by the way, that those solar panels may help save.

It's all part of the GOP class war.  And it's also a war for the future.