Obama's Green Economy Piles Up Yet Another Failure
The Presidency: In Tuesday night's debate, jobs were a hot topic, just as they were when Barack Obama promised four years ago he'd create 5 million green energy jobs. Dare we say he's far off the pace?
In April 2010, President Obama hailed a green energy company, A123 Systems Inc., as a success story, after granting it $249 million in taxpayer money in 2009 to build rechargeable batteries for electric cars.
Obama said the grant, part of his stimulus, would let A123 "hire more than 120 workers by the end of this year, more than 1,000 by the end of next year, and more than 3,000 by the end of 2012."
So here we are, at the end of 2012 and what has A123 done with that grant? Frittered it away, apparently. The company filed for bankruptcy Tuesday.
Despite the government's generosity with your money, A123 today has $460 million in assets and $376 million of debt and can't make payments due.
The company has said there is "no assurance" that it will be able to keep its doors open.
This is one of the clean energy businesses that Obama promised would "put thousands of people to work" and "spur growth in clean energy," which "means new jobs in cutting-edge industries all across America."
Obama's nearly four years in office have been marked by a series of green energy companies gone bust. Think of Solyndra, Ener1, Abound Solar, Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt and AES subsidiary Eastern Energy. And now add A123 to that list of failures.
In the wake of those failures, Bloomberg reported last week that maybe 675,000 green jobs have been created under Obama.
Not only is that nowhere near 5 million, each of those jobs likely cost one or more jobs elsewhere. During Spain's clean energy reign of terror, each green job created there killed 2.2 conventional jobs.
Green jobs might be the future, but let the future come as it will. Rushing it for political purposes creates deep problems |
