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Age of Transparency Update: DOE Edition

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  March 6th, 2010 at 12:00 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

It’s a familiar-sounding story.

Sometime in the past, the Executive Branch surreptitiously met with Energy Industry interests to craft policy on energy issues. Specifically, officials of the Department of Energy met with energy lobbyists and friendly think-tankers to rebut a university study that cast the industry in a bad light. When the ranking member of the congressional committee charged with oversight in this area asked legitimate questions regarding the propriety of the arrangement, DOE gave him the Heisman treatment, trying to duck and dodge the congressman’s inquiry altogether.

According to the congressman, “…[I]t seems that Department of Energy officials are more concerned about how to spin my questions than how to answer them, … I’m not surprised that DOE is uncomfortable with these questions, since it appears the agency relied on special interest assistance to write this federally-funded report.” (Emphasis added.)

That would be Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) and the era of BushCheneyHalliburton circa 2002?

Wrong. Try August, 2009. And this time, it’s the wind energy industry. The congressman asking questions is Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), ranking member of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

The university study is the one conducted by Gabriel Calzada Álvarez at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain. That’s the one that concluded that Spain’s commitment to wind energy did result in new “green” jobs — at an opportunity cost to the Spanish economy of 2.2 conventional jobs per green job created. The result has been persistent unemployment in the high teens. Clearly, the Obama Administration would dearly love to spike the study.

A recent Freedom of Information Act request has uncovered internal e-mails that show the agency worked hand-in-hand with industry and advocacy groups to draft a white paper on green jobs and then sought to dodge questions about the report, said Sensenbrenner, who yesterday again asked the DOE to provide information. …

The e-mails show the report was created as a direct response to a study from Spain’s King Juan Carlos University that raised questions about the employment created from renewable energy subsidies and showed that green jobs are often temporary and highly dependent on massive government subsidies. The Union of Concerned Scientists, American Wind Energy Association and the Center for American Progress were included in DOE correspondence about the white paper, which was drafted to directly counter the media exposure and Congressional interest over the Spanish study, e-mail records show.

Rep. Sensenbrenner raises another interesting question: Since when is it DOE policy to spend money for the specific goal of refuting an economic study of a foreign university?

Further reading:

Rep. Sensenbrenner’s letter to DOE (March 3, 2010)

Bombshell: Obama Admin. Caught Red-Handed Working with Big Wind Energy Lobbyists, Misleading American People, from the Institute for Energy Research.

Cross-posted at VladEnBlog.

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COMMENTS

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  • http://www.theminorityreportblog.com/blog/loren_heal Socrates

    The 52 elected a socialist oil-hater, and voila.

    High “opportunity cost” is exactly what this administration’s economic polices have achieved, and will achieve. Recoveries are led not by government guessing what’s best and ordering it achieved, but by money flowing to fund ideas that meet the new needs of a new situation.

    Instead, we’re a) propping up housing prices, car prices, and the like, while simultaneously funding unemployment and b) guessing that wind, solar, and non-fossil fuels will solve all of our problems and c) spending all of our legislative time on health insurance, bank “reform”, Net Neutrality, and global warming, thereby freezing with uncertainty any attempt by business to expand.

    All in all, Harry Reid was right: it points to the greatness of America that we only lost 36,000 jobs last month. That, and those of us left with jobs have learned to dodge the axe. We hope.

  • Viet71

    If so, I’ll go you one better.

    On second thought, I’d be banned for profanity.

    • mbecker908

      I’m pretty sure he’d come right out and say it.

    • Achance

      Lying is a bourgois concept that doesn’t apply to Comrade Obama; if he believes something to be the right thing to say, it is the truth.

  • deevee

    The latest from the WSJ and FOX News on the wind industry:

    http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/4069971/wind-farms-causing-health-problems/?p

    The global warming alarmists rule the day.

    Follow the money.

    • texasgalt

      If you travel out Interstate 20 going west to Abilene Tx and beyond toward Big Springs you will see over a hundred miles of windmills scattered on both sides of the highway. That’s hundreds of thousands of acres of ugly wind mills that contibute a tiny percentage of the energy the area needs. One nuclear facility on 75 acres could generate enough power for 1/2 of west Texas.

      One of the One’s favorite companies is cashing in: General Electric

      • texasgalt
        • 6eorge Jetson

          with transmission lines apparently buried underground while other electronic grid infrastructure is supported by ugly gray steel lattice structures?

          Hmmmn…couldn’t be that the wind turbines need to be sold to the public and so the extra cost of using more expensive support structures is just part of the marketing…until the public has fallen for it.

          • gekster

            LOL
            I know what you’re saying.

          • Next93

            I was talking to a fellow engineer at a trade show recently, and he mentioned that, in exchange for the last expansion of waste storage at it’s nuclear plants, the local power company had agreed to build some number of windmills. However, they hadn’t promised to hook them up to the grid, and as Butted discovered, the cost of getting power from where the wind blows to where people live and do business can outweigh the value of the power generated. So there are windmills all across the state that don’t do anything but kill birds and make the watermelons feel good about themselves.

          • Next93

            this is what happens when your fingers get to be faster than your eyes.

          • texasgalt

            part of the PR campaign to gain public acceptance. They all look strange to me out there on the Texas prairie, mixed in with the cactus, mesquite, herefords and still pumping oil wells.

            Windmills are a huge waste of space and this is being confirmed– a giant new coal-fired power plant has just been OK’d in the middle of all the windmills along I-20.

      • nessa

        …he was driving out to go walleye fishing. On the way there the wind was blowing too hard for the windmills, they have a minimum and maximum wind speed they must operate in. While he was fishing it rained, apparently the increased flow out of the hydro-electric dam meant they had to shut off the generating turbines. The entire time he was there though, the steam and CO2 from the coal fired power plant nearby was visible, a plume of smoke to mark a reliable source of power for area residents and industries.

        • texasgalt

          but for how long? After all, the Bama famously said he was going to make it so hard on coal-fired plants, they wouldn’t be able to operate.

          It seems that everything that works, he and the greenies want to destroy.

          • fairtaxguy

            usher in communism.

      • Vladimir

        I spoke with an economist from the Baker School of Public Policy at Rice U. He told me that the average output from wind is 17% of the design rating.

        Part of the problem is what they’ve experienced in the UK – when winter fronts – “blue northers” – come through, the windmills turn too fast. Behind the front, in high pressure, there’s no wind.

        Wind needs coal, gas or nukes as a backup, therefore it will always struggle economically.

  • rbdwiggins

    Decades of environmental rules, regulations and legislation across federal, state and local governments have tied the hands of the US Manufacturing and Energy Sectors, forced millions of jobs overseas and confiscated trillions of dollars from US Taxpayers.

    It didn’t have to happen, because the whole premise for nearly all of the punitive rules, regulations and legislation was based on a fraudulent scheme to generate, control and redistribute wealth.

    It’s time to expose the lie and demand accountability.

  • http://ubama.org/anicommentary/ notonmywatch

    “showed that green jobs are often temporary and highly dependent on massive government subsidies”

    And hyperinflation beckons.

  • dennism

    This also is a grievous evil– exactly as a man is born, thus will he die. So what is the advantage to him who toils for the wind?

  • http://www.dcworksforus.com Kenny Solomon

    Courtesy of Jim Hoft – great guy, true patriot and owner of Gateway Pundit……….

    Obama Administration Used Soros-Linked Wind Lobbyists To Hide Damning European Green Job Failures.

    Quote of the decade (so far):

    It?s well worth reading the whole thing to understand the relationship between the Left in government and the rent-seeking corporations who make their money not by producing anything, but by putting their hands in the next guy?s pocket.

    ——————-

    I can’t add a thing to that – no need.

    Cheers !

    • http://www.thehayride.com MacAoidh

      …Soros is the single largest private stockholder in Petrobras, the Brazilian national oil company that Obama gave $2 billion in loan guarantees to last fall so they could drill off their coast, and he’s also a major player in InterOil, a Canadian firm with a major natural gas play in New Guinea. Soros is also a major donor to both Markey and Waxman, and who do you think are the guys spearheading the congressional inquiry into hydraulic fracking?

      Shale gas represents an energy revolution for us. We have energy reserves in the Haynesville Shale in Louisiana and the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania and New York which could repatriate hundreds of billions of dollars that currently go offshore for oil, and the Democrats are doing everything they can to stop it BECAUSE NATURAL GAS DOESN’T REQUIRE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CONTROL. It also doesn’t put money in Soros’ pocket.

      More:

      http://thehayride.com/2010/02/waxmanmarkey-using-scare-rhetoric-to-control-hydraulic-fracturing/

      http://thehayride.com/2010/02/democrat-assault-on-fracking-begins/

      http://thehayride.com/2010/02/natural-gas-and-politics/

      http://thehayride.com/2009/12/are-congressional-democrats-aiming-to-shut-down-natural-gas-industry/

      • Vladimir
  • http://www.thehayride.com MacAoidh

    …and it always has been.

    If you could generate electricity with windmills in any great volume or at any kind of profit, it would have been done 100 years ago or more. Windmills have been around for HUNDREDS of years and they are good for pumping water out of the ground and that’s about it.

    If this administration wasn’t populated with children and fantasists, we wouldn’t have discussions about wind energy or green jobs.

    There are four kinds of energy sources which can provide significant results at competitive prices – oil, gas, coal and nuclear. That’s it. Everything else is a fraud designed to separate you from your money.

    • salgfla

      I agree completely on the wind nonsense, but let us keep hydro in the picture. I am not current with numbers but as I recall, hydro is significant as a low cost source in a number of countries.