Newspaper editorial boards present contrasting views of Solyndra and federal energy spending
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0103
Consider the Solyndra wars—and the implications for federal involvement in the stimulation of green-energy industries and advances—as seen by the editorial boards of the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
The Post‘s editors occupy the middle ground. Their 9 September editorial “Lessons from the Solyndra debacle ” reflects a bit of the Times‘s editors’ continuing faith in federal stimulation of green-energy technology and some of the WSJ‘s editors’ framing of Solyndra as a scandal and a teachable moment.
The Post editorial begins by summarizing:
In May 2010 President Obama paid a visit to the California factory of a solar-energy firm known as Solyndra, which the Energy Department had backed with a $535 million loan guarantee. “The future is here,” Mr. Obama declared.
On Thursday, FBI agents came through Solyndra’s doors with a different message: “Search warrant.” The details of the federal investigation are not yet public, but they probably have something to do with Solyndra’s unexpected announcement last week that it is filing for bankruptcy, leaving hundreds of workers jobless—and taxpayers on the hook for almost all of its government-backed loan. The collapse of one of the Obama administration’s signature “green jobs” efforts may mutate from an embarrassment to a scandal.
Might become a scandal? That same day, the WSJ‘s editors were already publishing an editorial headlined “The Solyndra scandal .”
The Post editorial called for reserving judgment about “wrongdoing, criminal or otherwise,” but declared that “it’s not too early to draw some policy lessons from Solyndra’s ignominious downfall.”
One lesson was “that government is no better than the private sector at picking industrial winners—and usually worse.” The Post saw the Energy Department as having unwisely, even rashly, supported Solyndra’s approach to solar-panel design, and noted that the “department has also placed large financial bets on electric vehicles and related battery technology, despite private forecasts that the market for that technology is not ripe.”
The Post called for limiting federal promotion of clean-energy technology “to an earlier stage in the process: basic scientific research,” which it called “a traditional public good.” The editors wrote, “Leave the high-risk, high-reward business of manufacturing and selling specific energy technologies to the market.”
The Post‘s second lesson was “that ‘green jobs’ offer a dubious rationale for federal support of clean-energy technology.”
On 25 September, the Times offered an editorial calling the situation a “panic,” not a scandal: “The Solyndra ‘panic .’” The subheadline summed up the editors’ view: “One company’s failure should not deter robust public investments in clean energy.”
The Times charged that “Republicans have now pounced on the bankruptcy as proof that the loan program is a bust, that the president’s signature green jobs program is a fraud, and that this country’s solar energy business is in terminal decline.” The editors declared, “None of that is true,” and asserted that Solyndra’s “demise should not spell the end of federal investment in the alternative fuels and energy sources that are critical to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, easing this country’s dependence on fossil fuels and keeping it competitive in the race for clean-energy jobs.”
The Times’s editorial acknowledged the possibility of wrongdoing. It also charged that Republicans’ criticism stems from a desire “to undermine the president, belittle global warming and discredit clean fuels,” and it cited Republican legislators’ past efforts to bring green projects to their own districts. Unlike the Post—and certainly unlike the WSJ—the Times sees federal green-energy efforts as genuinely reducing unemployment.
During September, the WSJ presented seven fully or partly Solyndra-focused editorials. Their headlines and subheadlines, supplemented by a short sample from each, create an overall picture of the WSJ‘s enthusiasm for what it is calling a scandal, and treating as a teachable moment:
- Solar flare-out: Another green government favorite goes belly up (1 September) Sample: “Solyndra’s story is more evidence that trendy, politically directed investments don’t make for efficient allocation of capital.”
- “The Solyndra scandal: The FBI raids a beneficiary of federal loan guarantees ” (9 September) Sample: “Americans need to know the full story of who made or influenced the decision to give Solyndra its loan guarantee, and if political pressure was brought to bear.”
- ‘The Solar orphan: Solyndra suddenly has no political parents ’ (15 September) Sample: "[T]he possibility [needs considering] that the rushed loan and enthusiasm for it was the product of political favoritism toward Solyndra investor and Mr. Obama’s campaign donor George Kaiser.”
- ‘The Anti-Solyndras: Smaller, growing firms need to be freed from Sarbox’s burdens ’ (22 September) Sample: “Think of these companies as the anti-Solyndras; their funding depends on pleasing markets, not Washington.”
- ‘Don’t pay as you go: Did someone say fiscal austerity? ’ (22 September) Sample: “As for the future of the Energy Department’s Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing loan program, if the battery-run car is such a high priority and promising technology, why not ask Warren Buffett to pay for it. He says he’s undertaxed.”
- “The Solyndra senators: Democrats won’t cut the solar-subsidy program ” (24 September) Sample: “About $100 million of the savings would come from the solar energy loan program that financed Solyndra, whose executives invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination at a House hearing yesterday.”
- ‘What Solyndra fiasco? The Department of Energy keeps shoveling out taxpayer money ’ (29 September) Sample: "[T]he Department of Energy seems oddly removed from the uproar. In a statement yesterday, Secretary Steven Chu said: ‘If we want to be a player in the global clean energy race, we must continue to invest in innovative technologies that enable commercial-scale deployment of clean, renewable power like solar.’ Translation: China is throwing taxpayer money into solar, so Americans should, too.”
It may be worth adding as well a report about the Post‘s second Solyndra-focused editorial this month, which appeared on the 19 September. That one began by praising what it called South Carolina Republican senator Jim DeMint’s “pithy new nickname for government efforts to select and subsidize industries: ‘venture socialism.’”
The editorial went on to describe an example of venture socialism: the Emerging Technology Fund. The editorial called it “a government-controlled pot of taxpayer money that has shoveled almost $200 million into 133 companies since its establishment in 2005. Among them is ThromboVision, a medical imaging start-up that absorbed $1.5 million—and then went bankrupt, just like Solyndra.” The ironical point is that ETF is “a pet project of Gov. Rick Perry’s Republican administration in Texas.”
The editorial also cited another Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, for taking "$24 million from a state renewable-energy trust fund” when he was governor of Massachusetts and using it “to subsidize alternative-energy businesses.” Mr. Romney, the editorial reports, now disapproves of such efforts by government.
This additional Post editorial closes with this summation:
Before Mr. DeMint came up with “venture socialism,” this inefficient and politicized form of resource allocation traveled under other names: “picking winners,” “industrial policy,” “corporate welfare” and “crony capitalism.” Whatever the moniker, selective subsidies do not “create” jobs; at best, they shift them from one place to another. That’s a lesson both parties need to learn.
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 published in ‘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.