Let me get this straight

First I pay my tax dollars to fund up to 100% of the construction of wind farms.  Then I am forced to buy the electricity they produce at many multiples of the cost of market priced electricity.  And now I hafta pay them NOT to produce electricty due to peiodic oversupply!?  I guess that makes as much sense as the rest of Obama's energy policies.

The Pope is Catholic, Bear go poop in the woods . . .

And another "green" energy firm that got a boatload of cash from the Obama administration is doing a massive layoff on its way down the drain.  But don't worry.  Abound isn't at all like Solyndra that got a half a billion in DOE loans.  It only got $400 Million of your money.

Obama has admitted he is OK with the high gas prices

Really.  He may not be interested in bringing the price of oil down, but I think most Americans are:

The Heritage Foundation points out that hammering the American consumer with high gas prices to make electric and hybrid cars more appealing is consistent with Obama administration policy and Chu's philosophy. That explains the refusal to allow the building of the Keystone XL pipeline and to allow drilling in wide areas of the U.S. and offshore areas.

Let me put this another way.  Obama is imposing (another) de facto tax that is crushing our economy and takes money directly out of your wallet to benefit a connected few and to please the left wing intelligentsia, but of course they are smarter than us.  So shut up, sit down and pay up. For your own good.

I have no problems with wind turbines to generate electricy

Not that I think we need to pop the suckers up on every rooftop to stop AGW.  That's been proven to be a load of (profitable to a select few) crap.  I nonetheless have no problem reducing emissions from power plants, notably sulfur and volatile organic compounds, that ruin my air quality.  However, before I support wind turbines or any other alternative energy, I have a few considerations for siting any such project.  For example, there are other valuable resources that need protection.  For example, it is idiotic to stick a wind farm as proposed in Martha's Vineyard sound which would ruin the aesthetic of one of the more beautiful stretches of coastline and water around.  It also cannot turn out to be an environmental disaster by killing migratory birds or leaking into the water.  Most importantly, it has to make some economic sense without a huge subsidy.  And few big scale wind farms do.  Now you can add one more negative into the mix.  It turns out that here is one more very important factor in any economic model for off shore wind farms--the wind.  By that I do not mean will there be enough wind to make the farm viable.  I mean will there be too much wind.  As this article in the New Scientist entitled "Hurricanes Deliver Fatal Blow to Wind Turbines" explains, an average hurricane will wipe out about half a wind farm.  Since they each cost about a quarter of a billion largely tax and rate payer subsidized dollars, I'm thinking hurricanes are an important variable that maybe ought to be included in any cost projections.

Pigs at the Obama energy trough

I often rail against the Main Stream Media.  But when a member of said media doggedly pursues a story and her network actually runs it, I have to tip my cap.  And speaking of tips, Solyndra was just the tip of the rotten Obama administration iceberg when it came to blatantly funneling your and my cash to their cronies under the guise of "clean energy."  So I give all appropriate kudos to CBS News's Sharyl Attkisson.  Sharyl was the one who broke the Solyndra scandal, and she hasn't stopped there.  So far she has found 11 more scam "green energy" companies that Obama has given over $6.5 Billion to.  We're talking five outright bankruptcies already and the rest are at junk bond status with the clock ticking:



And there are a lot more coming.

Another bust (at the taxpayers' expense) in the new green economy

According to www.barackobama.com:

The clean energy sector creates the jobs of today and tomorrow, helps protect our environment, and reduces our dependence on foreign oil.

According to Barack Obama:

 “I strongly agree with Vice President Gore that we cannot drill our way to energy independence, but must fast-track investments in renewable sources of energy like solar power, wind power and advanced biofuels, and those are the investments I will make as President. It's a strategy that will create millions of new jobs that pay well and cannot be outsourced, and one that will leave our children a world that is cleaner and safer." - Barack Obama, July 17, 2008

According to yesterday's Atlanta Journal Constitution:

Georgia ethanol plant sold, at taxpayers' loss
Dan Chapman 
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 

The failed Range Fuels wood-to-ethanol factory in southeastern Georgia that sucked up $65 million in federal and state tax dollars was sold Tuesday for pennies on the dollar to another bio-fuel maker with equally grand plans to transform the alternative energy world.
LanzaTech, a New Zealand-based biofuel company, paid $5.1 million for the plant in Soperton. Its main financial backer: Vinod Khosla, a California entrepreneur who also bankrolled Range Fuels, and helped secure its government loans, before Range went bust last year.
LanzaTech hasn't received the same type of loans, but the company has received $7 million from the U.S. departments of Energy and Transportation to assist in the development of alternative fuels.
The Range fiasco harkens other, failed renewable energy companies that received major taxpayer funding. California solar panel maker Solyndra got $535 million in federal loan guarantees. Beacon Power of Massachusetts, which makes energy-storage equipment, took in $43 million in federal money. Both filed for bankruptcy last year.
Range cost U.S. taxpayers $64 million and Georgia taxpayers another $6.2 million. Tuesday's sale netted $5.1 million which will help offset losses suffered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Georgia's money, which paid for some of the ethanol-making equipment, won't be recouped outright, but state officials expect LanzaTech to use the machinery.

According to Sam Shelton, director of research programs at Georgia Tech's Strategic Energy Institute:

"It was too damn big a risk for an apparently unproven technology and the due diligence I personally performed on Range would not entice me to invest in it," Shelton said Wednesday. Shelton was invited by Range a few years back to check out its operation in Colorado where it was based.
"Government should not be in the venture capital business selecting technologies," he added.

By the way, LanzaTech got a $7 Million loan from the Obama Administration to buy for about $5.1 Million the failed company that owed taxpayers almost $70 Million.  So it used our money to "pay us" a few cents on the dollar for the assets securing the first loan from the Obama Administration where we got defaulted on (screwed out of) for more than $68 Million.  I do not know about you, but of the above choices, I am going with Mr. Shelton.

Tubular, man--more reconciliation fun



As I mentioned in my earlier post about how the Republicans in the House managed to stick in a rider that de-funded the incandescent light bulb ban, Congress can pull a Dirty Harry to the Prez and include things in a last minute budget bill that he cannot veto because the Government would shut down.  Well those crazy kids in the House are at it again.  This time in an bill that extends the payroll tax cut, they included a law that requires the Obama Administration to decide within 60 days whether they are going to approve the construction of the Keystone Pipeline.  In an election year.  Go ahead, Prez, make my day.

Newsflash!!! This blog will continue to be illuminated by incandescent bulbs!!!

Congress just overturned the incandescent light bulb ban!!  The conferees added a rider to the appropriations bill that did away with ban.  (Technically it did away with any funding to enforce the 2007 law, but using the appropriations bill is how Congress de facto repeals laws when faced with a sure veto because Obama has to sign it or the government will shut down.)  Borepatch's long national nightmare is over, landfills will not have terribly toxic materials dumped in them from the manufacture and disposal of alternative lights, we can stop hoarding the good lights, we will not have to pay twenty times as much in a blatant corporate subsidy to GE and, most importantly, I can still get the normal looking twinkle lights for my Christmas decorations instead of the oddly bright things they are selling now.

America as a petroleum exporter

I don't know abot you, but I was shocked to read in the Wall Street Jornal that the US was just about to become a refined petroleum products exporter.  It gets better.  With the price of crude oil skyrocketing over the past couple years, it has now become profitable to explore and extract our own vast energy resources.  That's right, our own.  Everyone always knew we had oil and natural gas, it just wasn't worth it to get it because the Middle East and a few other places had reserves that were really easy (read "cheap") to get the oil from.  So if we or anyone else started to invest in extracting the more expensive stuff, the oligopoly would just crank up production and lower the price.  Except wars erupted, nuts got nukes, reserves start to dry up and revolutions came with the spring daisies.  So now we have un-ignorable incentives to go get our own energy.  Turns out we actually have more reserves than anyone thought and it looks like the future is once again pretty bright for our energy independence.  My only question is why the current batch of bozos in Washington are wasting our money and their time on boondoggles like they gave their buddies at Solyndra instead of expiditing (not tabling) new pipelines?