When the government-backed Solyndra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, policymakers supportive of the loan-guarantee program said variations of the following: “If this were a venture capital firm and only one out of 10 projects failed, they would be a great success.” That would be fine if it were private money, not taxpayer money. But now a second company is going under. Reuters reports: Beacon Power Corp filed for bankruptcy on Sunday, just a year after the energy storage company received a $43 million loan guarantee from a controversial Department of …
Today, the House Natural Resources Committee released its list of recommendations to the deficit reduction super committee. Their recommendations would go a long way to increase revenue for the federal government without raising taxes. The recommendations include increasing energy exploration and production both onshore and offshore, which would increase economic activity and generate revenue but also increase the money coming into the government through more royalties, lease sales, and rent fees. The committee also calls for increasing access to natural resources on federal lands and selling or transferring land away …
The Obama Administration lifted the moratorium on new permits and drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, but the same problem persists as it has for over a year now. There’s not a whole lot going on down there. ODS-Petrodata Weekly Rig Count keeps tabs on rigs under contract and rigs without contracts in different regions of the world. It also shows the utilization rate for offshore platform drilling rigs. Here are the numbers. U.S.: 44 percent, Europe/Mediterranean: 97 percent, Worldwide: 83 percent. The fleet utilization rate for the U.S. Gulf …
The Environmental Protection Agency called a Daily Caller report “comically wrong” this morning. That is an interesting analysis given that the EPA’s hideously bad global warming regulations are more of a joke than actual regulatory structure. Either way, the fun and games will soon end when Americans are paying higher energy prices and businesses are shedding jobs as a result of these “comically wrong” regulations. Earlier this week, The Daily Caller’s Matthew Boyle wrote that “The Environmental Protection Agency has said new greenhouse gas regulations, as proposed, may be “absurd” …
Senator Harry Reid (D–NV) and his Senate colleagues rejected the idea of cutting $1.5 billion unspent from a $7.5 billion advanced vehicle manufacturing technology loan program and another $100 million from the Department of Energy’s (DOE) loan guarantee program—the same program that funded bankrupt Solyndra. The political squabbling did not cause the partial government shutdown that many feared, but the real issue should be about the protection of these green programs. The reality is that simply reducing the programs is not enough. By leaving them in place at all, the …
A few weeks ago, the President asked Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson to withdraw the agency’s draft for more stringent Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). Although Jackson begrudgingly complied, the EPA is still moving to an ozone standard more stringent than the current one. The current ozone standard of 84 parts per billion (the concentration of ozone in the air over an 8-hour period—a drop of gasoline in a tanker truck is one ppb) prevailed while the EPA tried to implement even stricter rules, but since …
Solyndra’s bankruptcy has put federal spending for green projects under the microscope—and rightly so. Green jobs programs have been a profoundly wasteful use of taxpayers’ money and are doing more harm to the economy than helping it. They don’t even provide the promised grand environmental benefits. It’s important to keep these points in mind when discussing green jobs. 1.) Government spending does not create jobs. Government spending will “create” jobs in the sense that subsidies will allocate labor and capital to build windmills and solar panels. But the government is …
President Obama says he wants big corporations, including oil companies, to pay their “fair share” in taxes. His deficit reduction plan includes eliminating what he calls special loopholes and subsidies for oil and gas companies—despite the fact that they’re not specific to the oil and gas industry but the broader manufacturing sector. If the President wants to collect more money from the oil and gas industry, he should support increasing access to America’s energy resources. This would greatly increase the amount of revenue coming into the federal government, and it …
Last week, Solyndra became the third solar company in recent weeks to go belly-up, but the Fremont-based solar manufacturer made the most noise—because it lost more than a half a billion dollars in taxpayer money. Solyndra received one of the first stimulus loan guarantees, a $535 million loan. During a visit to the plant last year, President Obama said, “Companies like Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future.” In 2010, Solyndra closed one of its facilities and canceled its initial public offering, and last week …
President Obama may have finally added or saved a few jobs—7.3 million to be specific. In a surprising but welcome move, the President asked Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson to withdraw the agency’s draft for more stringent Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). This is an important victory for businesses as well as the additional 565 U.S. counties that would have been pushed into non-attainment status and suffered economically as a result. The EPA’s regulatory overreach on this one rule would have destroyed 7.3 million jobs and …
