Attacking Penny-Ante Cleantech Waste While Ignoring Dirty Energy’s $10-Billion-Plus Gravy Train

This article bashes a battery company that got stimulus money:

A company that received $150 million in government stimulus funds to build a facility to manufacture battery cells for electric cars has yet to begin mass-market production and misused some of the funds in questionable labor costs, according to the Energy Department’s Inspector General.

In a report released Wednesday, the IG found that LG Chem Michigan Inc. (formerly Compact Power Inc.) had yet to produce a single battery cell and was likely to miss the grant’s May 2013 deadline for completion. What’s more, the project created fewer than half of the projected 440 new jobs anticipated by proponents.

Compare this to the subsidies and protections the dirty-energy companies get every year:

In the United States, credible estimates of annual fossil fuel subsidies range from $10 billion to $52 billion annually, while even efforts to remove small portions of those subsidies have been defeated in Congress, as shown in the graphic below.

But when the dirty-energy crowd exerts such influence over our media and our political processes, it’s not surprising to see the obsession with motes in cleantech companies’ eyes while the I-beams sticking out of Big Oil’s and Big Coal’s and Big Gas’ eyes get ignored.

Why Do Our Legi$lator$ Favor Dirty Energy? Ca$h. Lot$.

Earlier this week, I briefly touched on how in hock our elected representatives are to Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Gas — a fact that is keeping America from fully implementing a clean-energy future.

Over at Renewable Energy World, Tor Valenza has some data on just how much dough the dirty-energy crowd tosses at politicians: “How can you tell? Easy. Go to www.dirtyenergymoney.com and find out how much $$$ your own representative or senators are $upported by oil and coal companies.”

To no one’s surprise, prominent Republicans like Paul Ryan, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell turn out to have got a lot of money from the dirty-energy lobby, and are quite friendly to dirty energy as well as quite hostile to clean energy. But what is a pleasant surprise, is that Henry Waxman, a Democratic congressman from California, gets nearly as much as Boehner et al do, yet manages to be a very good friend to solar energy. As the late great Texas Democratic House Speaker Sam Rayburn once told a freshman congressman who wanted to be excused from vote because he wanted to please his biggest contributors: “Son, if you can’t take their money, drink their whiskey, screw their women, and then vote against ’em, you don’t deserve to be here.”

(Crossposted to Renaissance Post.)