In New York Times letter, Republican leader reaffirms Solyndra charges

Florida Republican congressman Cliff Stearns chairs the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has been investigating Solyndra, the Department of Energy–bankrolled solar-energy company that failed spectacularly. Last week a New York Times editorial charged that Republican “partisanship [has] turned a legitimate inquiry into a circus of broad accusations aimed more at tarnishing the administration than contributing to a serious discussion of energy policy.” Now, in a 2 December letter to the editor , Rep. Stearns has fired back.

The editorial, headlined “The Solyndra mess,” granted that the Obama administration “appears to have misread the market in its eagerness to proclaim that it was creating green jobs.” The editors asserted, however, that Republicans have shown neither the Solyndra loan to be “a political favor to wealthy investors with Democratic ties” nor the Obama green-energy strategy to be a “flop.” They acknowledged Obama administration errors, but dismissed Republican charges of impropriety or illegality concerning the subordination decision allowing private investors to precede taxpayers in the event of default. The editors concluded that the “Republican inquiry has raised valid questions, but it has also unfairly tried to exploit one bad bet to discredit public investments in renewable technologies.” They urged Congress not to “lose sight of the bigger picture: the need to invest in promising alternatives to fossil fuels.”

In his rebuttal letter, Rep. Stearns renews the charge of inadequate financial oversight, a point already largely conceded by the editors. He accuses the White House of granting “a Solyndra investor, George Kaiser, and other Obama contributors ... unfettered access to the West Wing.” He does not actually link those other contributors to Solyndra. He calls the subordination decision “a violation of the Energy Policy Act of 2005,” but subsequently de-escalates on that point, writing, “Despite objections from the Department of Energy’s outside legal counsel, Energy Secretary Steven Chu approved the subordination based upon a questionable internal legal memo.” At the end, the congressman writes, “The loss of $535 million in taxpayer money demands accountability, and we continue to work with the White House on obtaining the facts.”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.