President Obama’s “clean energy” agenda is rapidly becoming a political liability. Last week, the president delivered an upbeat speech in Holland, Mich., at the high-tech battery lab of stimulus money beneficiary, Johnson Controls Inc. (which has also received $1.3 billion in government contracts since 2002, according to usaspending.gov).
Then on Monday, a much-touted Obama stimulus baby, Evergreen Solar Inc. of Massachusetts, filed for bankruptcy, leaving $485.6 million in debt and a vanished stock value.
Ironically, Evergreen closed a key plant last spring after relocating its manufacturing to Wuhan, China. It was competition from China’s government-subsidized solar plants — along with a lack of demand and Obama’s unresponsive permitting system — that sent government-subsidized Evergreen down in flames.
Sifting through Evergreen’s ashes, the bankruptcy court found $26.3 million in federal job contracts plus millions in state subsidies and an unknown amount of federal stimulus money — unknown because nobody can find a trace of the grants.
Obama and Evergreen acknowledge the grants. But the government’s recovery.gov stimulus-tracking records come up blank, as do Obama bureaucrats charged with administering the $821 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Clearly, the Obama administration’s left-wing tactic — ideologically picking winners (“good guys”) and losers (“villains”) and rewarding the winners with government payoffs — isn’t working too well.
Unless, that is, you are a strategically positioned insider who helped design the tactic and picked some of the winners. And here we meet Pacific Northwest Democrat Jay Inslee, U.S. representative for Washington’s 1st Congressional District, home of Microsoft and Boeing.
Inslee was one of the architects of Obama’s stimulus bill, albeit through a back door called the Apollo Alliance, which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., specifically credited the day the bill passed in February 2009.
After praising the bill’s job-creating clean energy vision, Reid said, “the Apollo Alliance has been an important factor in helping us develop and execute a strategy that makes great progress on these goals and in motivating the public to support them.”
The Apollo Alliance began in 2001 with small foundation grants to bridge the gap between blue-collar unions and Big Green environmentalists. If these opposing forces could be brought together, and find an entry point into Congress, they could thrive together with government money at the expense of taxpayers.
Rep. Inslee was the entry point. In 2002, he wrote an op-ed in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer titled, “New Apollo Project Can Help Us Unplug Our Need for Oil,” a restatement of the early Apollo Alliance talking points.
When the time came to proclaim the alliance openly in 2006, Inslee joined with Bracken Hendricks, Apollo’s executive director at the time, to write the Alliance’s manifesto, “Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy.”
Writing about clean-energy pioneers set Inslee on another path. The story of Richard Swanson was particularly impressive: His SunPower Corp., maker of superefficient solar cells, was “the blue chip stock in the solar energy field, one that Wall Street analysts feel has to be in any renewable energy portfolio.”
So Inslee started buying SunPower stock in 2006 and more every year. His congressional disclosure statements show he could have invested as much as $125,000 in SunPower by 2010.
Inslee sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has a direct impact on SunPower. At least $90 million in federal contracts with SunPower Corp. have been issued.
Inslee is a co-founder of the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition, which pushes policies that benefit SunPower.
A controlling interest in SunPower was bought in June by Total, the French oil major, which is expected to help the solar company beat all competition.
Inslee is now running for governor of Washington and Obama’s clean energy agenda is running America into the ground. And they haven’t found Evergreen’s records yet.
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
