Wall Street Journal editorial renews allegations about federal energy politics
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8013
“Government has a role in funding basic research that can’t otherwise attract private capital,” the Wall Street Journal‘s opinion editors stipulate in a weekend editorial , “but subsidies for commercial ventures lead to misallocated capital and taxpayer losses.”
Without repeating the headline’s key idea—cronyism—anywhere in their text, the editors make clear that that’s the charge they’re leveling. Subsidies for green-energy ventures or R&D, they allege, “increase political cynicism as taxpayers learn that the subsidies always seem to flow to the rich and powerful who finance the Democratic Party.”
Just before the recent federal shutdown, the editors note, the Department of Energy awarded “another $66 million in green-energy subsidies to 33 companies and research facilities.” Almost 30% went to companies linked to Vinod Khosla , a Silicon Valley investor (and Sun Microsystems founder) who, the editors say, “has a knack for getting taxpayers to aid his companies.” Khosla Ventures, they report, invested heavily in a company called Range Fuels. Advancing their cronyism charge, they add:
The federal government lost more than $80 million on Range Fuels, and it is now investing another $4 million in a company buying assets of that previous failure. Mr. Khosla’s venture company gets help coming and going.
After the editors link federal grants to a Democratic Party fundraiser that Khosla hosted at his home, they inject further sarcasm:
A few days after the Energy Department announced its September grants, LanzaTech welcomed former Obama campaign director Jim Messina to its board of directors. When not dispensing his vast technical expertise about “advanced liquid fuels,” Mr. Messina runs Organizing for America, which is Mr. Obama’s vehicle for advanced liquid politics.
The editors report counterarguments from Khosla and others to the charge that politics is involved in the awards, then remark that “somehow big-dollar grants keep flowing to companies backed by the same handful of politically connected venture firms.” They emphasize that Obama administration appointees and federal career staff “do not operate in a political vacuum,” but are “well aware who is connected and who isn’t.”
Citing what they call three “prominent green taxpayer failures"—Solyndra (solar panels), A123 (batteries), and Fisker Automotive, all targets of past WSJ editorials—the editors ask, “If these investments are so wonderful, why can’t Mr. Khosla and friends invest their own money and leave taxpayers out of it?”
---
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. 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.