This is Obama’s Enron, except a) it’s much worse and b) the press will continue to cover for him. By all rights, it should put a stake through the heart of the “green jobs” nonsense, but it won’t.
36 thoughts on “Solyndra”
Comments are closed.
This is Obama’s Enron, except a) it’s much worse and b) the press will continue to cover for him. By all rights, it should put a stake through the heart of the “green jobs” nonsense, but it won’t.
Comments are closed.
Another good reason for entrepreneurs, including space entrepreneurs to take the “no federal funds” pledge. Especially given how the Tea Party is looking for dirt to use against President Obama. I pity Elon Musk if either Telsa or SpaceX go sour.
As a side note the cartoonist seemed to have skipped the billion dollars private venture capitalists, including Sir Richard Branson and the Walton family put into Solyndra before the government invested in them. But I guess they needed to keep it simple for their Tea Party readers 🙂
I pity Elon Musk if either Telsa or SpaceX go sour.
It’s idiotic to compare Solyndra to SpaceX.
As a side note the cartoonist seemed to have skipped the billion dollars private venture capitalists, including Sir Richard Branson and the Walton family put into Solyndra before the government invested in them.
What difference does it make?
So Matula, you claim to be a professor. Have you taken a no taxpayer dollars pledge?
Sir Richard Branson and the Walton family didn’t use their company’s money to invest in Solyndra in exchange for free solar panels on their personal homes.
In other words, they did not take contributions to their presidential campaigns in return for government contracts.
Thomas, if the government ever offers me $1.6b I’m going to take it. I will put it to good use. However, SpaceX gets $1.6b only on delivery.
Then again, so did $olyndra as that 2nd to last panel indicated.
To be fair, Ken makes my point even better. I don’t begrudge Solyndra or SpaceX for taking taxpayer dollars. My issue is the government taking my money to give to them. If I care to invest in either company, the better deal would be for me to get a lower tax rate and use the money I get to keep to invest in the company I choose. You want the power of a community, let the individuals in the community choose winners and losers. Don’t put all that power in a community organizer, who now has a proven track record of picking winners that turn out to be losers.
Leland,
In another thread you claim to work for NASA, so I guess 100% of your funding is from federal taxpayers. By contrast state colleges only get about 30% of their funding from state sources, usually just enough to offset the lower tuition charged to in-state residents. Many would love to be “privatized” so political types would stop meddling in the management and they could focus on fewer high quality students.
I don’t work for NASA. Next question.
I should also point out, what I said earlier:
I don’t begrudge Solyndra or SpaceX for taking taxpayer dollars. My issue is the government taking my money to give to them.
For example, you make a silly claim: By contrast state colleges only get about 30% of their funding from state sources
Really? How many of your students receive financial aid? Do you claim all those students as part of that 30%? It reminds me of this story about Harvard:
Fortunately, the average Harvard financial aid package is close to $41,000.00. In addition, about 70% of Harvard students receive some form of aid, with nearly 60% receiving need–based scholarships. This means that for those students who cannot afford the Harvard price tag, the cost of attending the university is not more than that of a low-cost state college.
So, for SpaceX to be like you; 30% of the development of Falcon and Dragon would have come from the government. Then, they would turn around and charge the government for the final product well above its true market value. Their not. Bigelow did.
And I realize you don’t work at Harvard, but I’m putting my daughters through a local state college. I wonder how much of a kick back the department heads get by pushing various textbooks? I’m sure it doesn’t compare to what Democrats got from Solyndra.
I’m missing the the Enron connection. Enron got a lot of coverage because it was a big company with many employees and many shareholders who the company management apparently worked hard to mislead.
Solyndra seems to be a much smaller company and as yet there seems to be no evidence of management deception.
Why should I care about Solyndra?
Why care? Obama’s direction.
“Solyndra seems to be a much smaller company and as yet there seems to be no evidence of management deception.
Why should I care about Solyndra?”
That Solyndra went bankrupt so soon after getting such a loan guarantee (they received a loan guarantee from the government, actually, bur we’re now stuck with the tab) is almost prima facia evidence of fraud. The due diligence the government does prior to issuing a loan guarantee of any size is such that a company in that much trouble could not have received one – unless there was malfeasance on the part of the company, the government, or both.
“In another thread you claim to work for NASA, so I guess 100% of your funding is from federal taxpayers. By contrast state colleges only get about 30% of their funding from state sources, usually just enough to offset the lower tuition charged to in-state residents.”
And yet if a student says a professor should perform better because the student is the one paying the bills the professor will respond that because the school gets money from the government the student needs to stfu.
From Forbes:
“Let’s keep in mind that Solyndra filed its loan guarantee application to build a $733 million solar panel factory during the George W. Bush administration and it was approved in the early months of the Obama administration. At the time, Solyndra had raised more than $600 million from investors – not chump change, even by Silicon Valley standards – and solar panels were already rolling off its first assembly line. Chinese companies had just started to enter the U.S. market and seemed a distant threat. (Within two years they would become the world’s biggest suppliers of solar panels, pushing prices down by more than 50%.)”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddwoody/2011/09/08/solyndra-raid-is-failure-a-crime/
It was public knowledge that the Chinese government was pushing over 32 billion into the solar panels market. The U.S. about 3 billion.
The idea that china “seemed a distant threat” is beyond silly. If we wanted to seriously compete and grab that market anyone but a fool would know we would have to match dollars. It was a forgone conclusion that whichever government pumped the most in was going to grab the market.
Thomas,
I’ve seen this point about the billion in venture funding as somehow exculpatory. I’m honestly trying to figure out how it helps the Obama administration. Are we supposed to be thinking, “Well … A venture capital firm flushed their money so it wasn’t so idiotic for the Energy Department to make this decision.”?
Um… No.
As I understand it, they needed the money to build a new plant that cost around ~700 million dollars. Assuming 250k per employee base operating cost (which is very generous) and 1000 employees, that’s 1 billion dollars total from the around the time when this money came in. They were making sales (I’m not sure what those numbers were but my impression is that it was in the 100-300 million/year range). That leaves about 600-900 million unaccounted for. Do you mean the business plan didn’t account for the venture capital so the DOE was not brainlessly foolish to give this loan?
The fact that there was more money from outside sources makes it look worse.
How does a company go from building a new fab facility to I-give-up-we’re broke in one year with 600 million unaccounted for?
This literally looks like an episode of “The Sopranos.” Tony gets some guys to buy houses with government backed loans for “neighborhood improvement,” he buys dumps, abandons them and pockets the remainder. In order for that to work, he needed the assistance of a corrupt politician and a community organizer.
In the fictional account, they were different people.
“Let’s keep in mind that Solyndra filed its loan guarantee application to build a $733 million solar panel factory during the George W. Bush administration and it was approved in the early months of the Obama administration.”
Well, United States Enichment Corporation (USEC) applied for a $2 billion loan guarantee for the American Centrifuge Project under the Bush Administration, and it was denied “in the early months of the Obama Administration” (despite assurances by candidate Obama that approving it was a priority of his). The reason given was the the business case was not strong enough. I don’t know the details USEC provided, but the general outlook for an American company entering the market with modern centrifuges was quite good. Better than any solar market will ever be…
The trolls are having comprehension problems — is there a version for Even Bigger Dummies?
MfK
“Better than any solar market will ever be”
I agree that there were better options. In my opinion, when the government is going to get involved it should not be for an industry/corp that has both alternatives and they are cheaper.
Ethonal is another one that comes to mind.
As an aside, energy use predictions suggest we have about a hundred years to become a space faring civilization for real.
As an aside, energy use predictions suggest we have about a hundred years to become a space faring civilization for real.
I get somewhere around a billion years myself. Energy use on the Earth has one fundamental constraint, the energy output of the Sun. Everything else is just intermediate forms of energy (such as gasoline is a store of energy) which can be obtained in other ways.
Nuclear energy? I suppose you could claim that fission is the result of energy from a sun, just not our sun.
I get somewhere around a billion years myself
Nope. Not according to the article linked here. The energy chart is only level for about 200 more years meaning we only have about 100 to get serious.
To clarify, it’s not about running out of energy. Read the linked article.
Ok, I read the article. I still stand by the billion year figure as being a far more genuine constraint than what the article claims. First, it’s painfully obvious that an extrapolation of exponential energy consumption into the future will eventually break. The article then claims that humanity is dependent on exponential growth of energy consumption, but that is an unfounded assertion.
To become a “space-faring civilization” we just need to be able to put things in space cheaply. That has a fixed energy cost per unit mass and hence, is not dependent on energy consumption increasing exponentially. Similarly, the energy cost of a human hasn’t changed significantly.
And if the human population should continue to increase exponentially there are various things that will happen to keep the human population from doing so indefinitely. Merely having large scale population die-offs (accidental or intentional) doesn’t preclude the creation of space-faring civilizations (to the contrary, such disasters and/or malice might encourage them).
the energy cost of a human hasn’t changed significantly
The point is it has. Each individual uses a lot more power today than they did before and will use more still in the future (I hear replicators take a lot of power 😉 ) Even if population stabilizes at some limit, the power requirement continues to go up.
I don’t know if I agree with his conclusion that this means we will add more heat to the environment than the earth can radiate into space. But if his numbers have any relation to reality we are looking at hundreds of years rather than billions to become space faring. We can’t wait for SOL to become a red giant. That’s not the limiting factor anymore under this scenario.
So the graph says that in ~100 years we become a Kardashev Type-1 civilization, 1300 years a Type II, 2500 years a Type III. And you can’t be much bigger than a Type I civilization and remain bound to a single planet. So we have about 100 years to develop an interplanetary drive, 1000 years for an interstellar, and 2000 years for an intergalactic drive. 3600 years from now we will be using as much energy as produced by the observable universe (Type IV?). We’ll need something like a crosstime drive before then.
Joe,
The point is that its just not a President Obama program or mistake. The basic reason is that China has decided to invest heavily in solar energy and the U.S., handicapped by the Tea Party economic philosophy is not in a position to counter them.
http://www.thestreet.com/story/11246937/1/china-going-for-a-manufacturing-ko.html?cm_ven=GOOGLEN
China: Going for a Manufacturing KO
By Tom Taulli, InvestorPlace.com
09/13/11 – 10:03 AM EDT
Instead of investigating how to keep the U.S. from losing another manufacturing industry (and thousands of future jobs) to China, Congress is too busy trying to find something else to blame on the President. You would almost think the Chinese were paying the Tea Party Republicans to be that stupid, but they don’t have to as the lost of high tech manufacturing to emerging super powers like China is the natural consequence of basing economic policy on an economic philosophy best suited for 18th Century regional agrarian economies.
Hi Leland,
Sorry for the delay, but I have been very busy doing consulting.
The only one getting kickbacks have been financial aid advisors since President Bush privatized the corporation (Sallie Mae) that guarantees student loans.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5498332&page=1
New Law Would Ban College Loan Kickbacks
The explosion of student debt is just another failed Republican economic policy that the Tea Party is trying to blame on Democrats.
I suspect that China is mainly into solar energy so they can in effect earn money selling us the rope to hang ourselves. Solar is a horrible energy source for an industrial civilization (at least until some decent method of storing large amounts of energy is found). Orbital power plants might be another story–they at least don’t need to solve the storage problem, but of course have their own problems.
I think you’re fooling yourself if you think the tea party has anything to do with the US not adopting solar–the US has been talking about massive solar plants since the 60’s.
Daver,
Not just about solar energy, but simply making all of American industry competitive in global markets. The Solar Energy industry is only the most recent example.
Thomas,
Even assuming solar is a good technology to invest in, why aren’t other US companies crashing as result of China’s aggressive business plan to steal jerbs? [blah, blah, blah, insert thumb sucking here – for examples search for articles written about Japan 20 years ago]
So we shouldn’t investigate a gross, obvious misuse of taxpayer dollars because: 1) very wealthy investors rolled the dice on it (incidentally I’m curious on the timeline. Did that venture capital come in after the loan? Did Solyndra use the loan as a selling point to the VC guys?); and 2) an investigation would be playing into the hands of the Chinese.
You seem to make this argument amidst ridicule of the Tea Party who regards government poor managers of public funds.
Comedy gold!
making American industry competitive in global markets
Thomas, you think socialist crony capitalism is the best way to accomplish that which is dead wrong, but you go on and keep beating that dead horse (if only it was just a dead horse and not deadly to millions of people.)
The point is that its just not a President Obama program or mistake. The basic reason is that China has decided to invest heavily in solar energy and the U.S., handicapped by the Tea Party economic philosophy is not in a position to counter them.
China builds high speed rail so we need to. My view is that Chinese industry would have taken over solar panels whether China “invested” that money or not. The US is operating at a significant, self-inflicted disadvantage. While I’m willing to accept blame for helping keep Obama’s missteps from being larger, I’m not willing to characterize those missteps as not being big enough.
I missed something here. The tea party is preventing the US from investing heavily in solar energy and making US industry competitive in global industry? How exactly are they doing this? By passing more environmental restrictions? Raising the price of labor? Raising the overhead of doing business in the country? Reducing automation? Stifling innovation?
I thought this thread was dead but it isn’t so…
http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/obama-admin-tries-blame-bush-solyndra
“But Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., chairman of the oversight subcommittee that is conducting the Solyndra investigation, said that there’s a problem with that version of events. “In reality, on January 9, 2009 — at the end of the Bush administration — the DOE Credit Committee voted against offering a conditional commitment to Solyndra, saying that the deal was premature and questioning its underlying financial support,””