Solyndra received more than half-a-billion dollars from taxpayers through the Obama administration’s massive stimulus bill in 2009 and filed for bankruptcy in 2011. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote about another failure from the Obama era, this one costing taxpayers as much as $510 million. The company, Tonopah Solar Energy, operated the Crescent Dunes solar plant in Nevada, which received $737 million in guaranteed loans during the Obama administration. Tonopah was granted a Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan in early December.
Daily Wire 12/14/20
President Elect Joe Biden plans to nominate former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm as his Energy Secretary. Your reliable reporter dug into her background and files this report. She graduated from University of California at Berkeley (Harvard West) with a BA in political science and French. (You were expecting chemical engineering?) She received a law degree from that West Texas favorite, Harvard, in 1987. She worked in the Michael Dukakis Presidential 1988 campaign. She became Attorney General of Michigan. 1988. She served as Governor of Michigan from 2003 – 2011. Her popularity dropped to 32% by December 2007 after a series of tax increases.
She returned to Berkeley to teach law in 2011. And then, with no more qualification than being a clean energy advocate, she was named to the Berkeley Energy and climate Institute (tag line We Hate Big Oil) and became a project scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley national Laboratory. She later served on the Board of Dow Chemical.
The amazing thing is just how many ‘additional environmental posts’ that exist. /former Mayor Pete Buttigieg will be Transportation Secretary (experience?). Former EPA chief Gina McCarthy will be ‘leader of domestic climate efforts.’ McCarthy will be the domestic counterpart to John Kerry (who served in Vietnam) as international special climate envoy. Do you suppose there will be any jealousy over such similar positions?
This quote from AOC is all West Texans need to know. “I’m over the moon right now,” seeing impetus for her impossibly expensive Green New Deal.
Again much of this will hinge on the outcome of the two Senate seats in Georgia.
The stock market is hitting new highs. The summation index (see https://professorelam.typepad.com/markets/) is topping but has not turned down. This suggests the market may hold up past Inauguration in late January. Crude oil prices have almost made it to $50. But I don’t have much hope for crude prices once the climate change team starts moving fast as the headlines put it.
