As I've learned just on a personal level of late, there are plenty of people who aren't familiar with the name of the taxpayer-funded, failed solar company Solyndra, let alone the many other green-energy companies that have fallen by the wayside under Obama's watch, but most are more generally aware of the Obama administration's push to forcibly incorporate green energy jobs into our economy. Ergo, in the new ad they released this morning, I think it's wise of Romney camp to point out just how wishy-washy and wasteful the Department of Energy's various stimuli and loan programs have been, and point to specific failures to combat the White House's enchanting hopenchange-y rhetoric. You can't make an idea work well for the economy just because it works well for your own politics, President Obama:
As the Washington Examiner pointed out over the weekend:
"We can invest $15 billion a year in renewable sources of energy ... to create 5 million new jobs, new energy jobs, all across [the] country, jobs that pay well, jobs that can't be outsourced," Obama, the candidate, told an Ohio crowd.
But the president has fallen far short of his own mark.
The wind industry has actually lost about 10,000 jobs since 2009, even though it doubled its domestic production, the American Wind Energy Association reports. And Republicans were quick to point out that as Obama blocks the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to Texas, the oil and gas industry has added 75,000 jobs since the start of his term.
Obama spent $90 billion of his stimulus package on green energy projects, including weatherization of buildings and development of electric vehicles. Yet, by the end of last year, just 16,100 people landed new jobs in the so-called green industry, Labor Department statistics show, far short of the 200,000 jobs the White House projected it would help create each year.
Hey, remember this time two years ago, when President Obama was busily declaring things like, "The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra"? It would be laughable... if he wasn't still doing the exact same thing.