ABC News and conservative poopyheads sensationalizes government loans to electric car company

ABC News and conservative poopyheads sensationalizes government loans to electric car company

"A key question, experts and investigators say, is whether another Solyndra is in the offing," according to an ABC News story about an electric car manufacturer that got a federal loan guarantee but is building its cars in Finland.

However, as Media Matters points out, the article includes, but sort of buries, the information that the U.S. government loan guarantee was for work that's being done here:

    Henrik Fisker said the U.S. money has been spent on engineering and design work that stayed in the U.S., not on the 500 manufacturing jobs that went to a rural Finnish firm, Valmet Automotive.

That's been done in consultation with the Energy Department, which made the loans and which issued a statement saying:

    Fisker’s loan has two parts. In the first part, Fisker used $169 million to support the engineers who developed the tools, equipment and manufacturing processes for Fisker’s first vehicle, the Fisker Karma. That work was done Fisker’s U.S. facilities, including its headquarters in Irvine, California which has 700 employees and plans to continue hiring. While the vehicles themselves are being assembled in Fisker’s existing overseas facility, the Department’s funding was only used for the U.S. operations. The money could not be, and was not, spent on overseas operations. The Karma also relies on an extensive network of hundreds of suppliers in more than a dozen U.S. states.

    The larger portion of the loan -- $359 million – is supporting the production of Fisker’s Nina vehicles. Fisker is using this funding to bring a shuttered General Motors plant in Delaware back to life and employing more than 2,500 workers. Fisker was attracted to this site in part by the opportunity to rehire some of the trained, dedicated workers who lost their jobs when that plant closed.

It would be far better, of course, if the 500 jobs that are currently in Finland were in the United States right now. But the government money that Fisker received appears to have gone to support research and manufacturing in the U.S., as it was supposed to. And Fisker appears to be on the path to create substantially more jobs here. The development of an electric car industry with government support is a story worth reporting, but ABC's Solyndra-centric framing and attention-grabbing headline are misleading.

Fisker is an on the edge of innovation company. Can they make high to medium high end luxury cars that will appeal to people who now drive Mercedes and BMWs and the answer seems to be yes. Which is probably the big reason conservatives are hoping they fail.

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The Solyndra Scandal in Context - Republicans pursued clean energy loans, too

The Solyndra Scandal in Context - Republicans pursued clean energy loans, too

As I predicted, Solyndra's bankruptcy is serving as the new Climategate -- it's giving conservative politicians who once felt the need to grope for some sort of muddled centrist-sounding position (e.g.,"the science is uncertain," or "all of the above") the pretense they need to transition to full-on oppositionalism.

We see this now as Republicans decry clean energy loan guarantees that they were begging for a few years ago. I had some fun with Mitch McConnell a few days ago, and ThinkProgress has a great post nailing Daryl Issa -- who even now is investigating Solyndra -- for pleading with DOE's Steven Chu to fast track a loan guarantee to Aptera Motors, an electric car manufacturer.

The hypocrisy charge is legit, as far as it goes, and it's catnip for the media and for activists. But let's not forget: the main problem with Issa's effort to cripple the clean energy loan guarantee program is not that he did something contrary earlier, but that it's a bad idea to cripple the clean energy loan guarantee program.

I worry that the hypocrisy attack makes it look like Republicans were doing something embarrassing or unseemly by pursuing loans for clean energy companies in their districts. Quite the contrary! If I were one of Darryl Issa's constituents, I would be most pleased to hear that he was angling to get some advanced manufacturing in my district. Electric cars are are a booming market and it would be to a region's great benefit to establish an early foothold as a center of research, skills, and experience. Issa was serving the people who elected him.

This gets at a weird schizophrenia in public dialogue about energy policy. In an economist's dream world, all units of carbon emissions are priced equally. The government does not pick winners or otherwise interfere in the market. The carbon price creates demand for new low-carbon options, which pulls new competitors into the market. Lots of left pundits seem to have convinced themselves that this is the only thing they can credibly advocate for. Anything else is vaguely malodorous.

This is pure mythology, though. For one thing, a carbon price wouldn't be enough to spur innovation (see here or here). Putting that aside, though, it's not like a price on carbon would, in and of itself, make energy markets "free" or "fair." There are no markets in the world more riddled with state intervention, collusion, price-fixing, subsidies, tax breaks, cartels, monopolies, etc. etc. The government is always and already involved in energy markets, always and already "picking winners and losers."

Conservative Republicans don't care if they have to lie all day every day. They don't care if we all eventually find out they have been flaming two faced hypocrites for the millionth time. It is all about the politics of destruction and hysteria.