Last Friday, Solyndra’s top executives declined to answer any questions of substance before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, giving little insight into how the company managed to lose hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. The hearing will undoubtedly disappear from the news cycle soon, and the issue itself will face a similar demise when it is no longer politically useful. These Washington media narratives may temporarily captivate the public interest, but in the process we lose sight of the bigger picture: 1,100 American workers lost their jobs when Solyndra failed. These were people who accepted positions with Solyndra under the false promise of green energy, a promise the president made to those workers the day he visited their factory last year:
“Every day that you build this expanded facility, as you fill orders for solar panels to ship around the world, you’re demonstrating that the promise of clean energy isn’t just an article of faith — not anymore. … We’re poised to transform the ways we power our homes and our cars and our businesses. And we’re poised to lead our competitors in the development of new technologies and products and businesses. And we are poised to generate countless new jobs, good-paying middle-class jobs, right here in the United States of America. That’s the promise of clean energy. And thanks to the men and women here today — and the innovators and the workers all across America — it’s a promise that we’ve already begun to fulfill.”
Unfortunately, it was a promise he could not keep, and should have known he couldn’t. It was a promise based entirely on his faith that Washington bureaucrats know better than the millions of individual actors in the marketplace which energy technology will succeed in the future.
The victims of Solyndra’s fall are not just the taxpayers who saw $500 million of their money handed to a private company that, it turns out, was on the verge of failure. As bad as that is, the pain will be felt more acutely by workers who put their faith in the president’s word that green jobs would yield unfathomable dividends.
The nation is in a jobs crisis, and nobody on either side of the political divide should claim victory when a job is lost. But we cannot sit back and allow our policymakers to choose which jobs are worth having and then use our tax dollars to prop up their preferred companies.
The administration has repeatedly opposed, through higher taxes and more stringent regulation, traditional manufacturing and resource development, while supporting “green jobs” above all else.
A June article in the Washington Post found that of the president’s 41 visits to businesses outside the Washington area at that point in time, 22 had been to clean-tech companies.
It’s easy for politicians to sweep into clean-energy facilities and talk big about the future, as the president has done, but real people are struggling to find jobs and would be happy to get good-paying employment in any industry that demanded their skills. Giving a few individuals temporary jobs based on political considerations is irresponsible, and the president needs to show that he and his administration have learned something from this experience.
The president may be able to put all of his eggs in one green basket, but the American people cannot afford that luxury.
John Monaghan ([email protected]) is the energy and environment legislative specialist at the Heartland Institute.
