If you're fortunate, you were until this moment unaware that there was once such a thing as the Rush Limbaugh television show. If you are so unlucky as to have seen an episode, you may remember a charming segment devoted to cutting down trees. Not harvesting timber or splitting firewood, mind you, just knocking over trees. In this repeating bit, cameras focused on some little pine or oak, often bearing a sign with a message to "tree huggers" or a personal note for Al Gore. Then, with a roar of chain saws and a nice cloud of two-stroke smoke, the tree was dispatched.
Killing a tree for no visible purpose never failed to generate guffaws from Limbaugh and his audience. Perhaps they pictured liberals as shivering in front of their televisions, biting their lips in horror as the poor-widdle-twee went boom. Perhaps they thought it made Al cry. Whatever they visualized, the point of the nightly tree-felling was clear: they ran the bit not because they thought it helped anyone, but because they thought it would be painful to those who cared about the environment. it was the video equivalent of pulling the wings off flies.
There have been many moments since then where Republians have demonstrated their addiction to despoiling, but it was those clips on Limbaugh that made me understand the hard right. They don't shout "drill, baby, drill" because they think it will make gas cheaper. They don't create signs in which cap and trade (a program designed by Republicans of a different era) is bracketed by a hammer and sickle because they think capturing carbon will cost jobs. They do it because they think it will piss you off. They do it even when they know what they're doing is causing real and lasting damage. They do it because hurting liberals is more important than doing the right thing. Hell, as far as today's GOP is concerned, hurting liberals is the definition of doing the right thing. If you like it, they're again' it, even if "it" is breathable air, clean water, or a climate not racing toward irrevocable harm. They've generalized the idea that liberals are pro-livable planet. So Republicans have given screwing the Earth a priority position on their to-do list.
The latest sign that the GOP still gets its institutional rocks off by kicking the planet is the insistence that funding for disaster relief be offset by funds from programs designed to spur development of green cars. That this program has been extremely successful doesn't matter. That it's generated tens of thousands of jobs doesn't matter. That the program has kept development of advanced technology in the US doesn't matter. That the biggest beneficiary of the program has been "we didn't take a bail out" Ford doesn't matter. Even the fact that the program was signed by George Bush doesn't matter. Is it green? Does it work? Kill it. Kill it now.
With that background, it's little wonder that the failure of Solyndra has many on the right feeling like Christmas came early. It seems to encompass all those things they hate. Government loans to companies not pumping oil. Regulations bypassed for companies not pumping oil. Companies... not pumping oil. Above all, the failure of Solyndra is deeply satisfying to the right because it's seen as reinforcing the truism that solar, like other green technology, can't survive without government help. Can't even survive with government help.
Thing is, that interpretation is about 180 degrees from the truth.
Solyndra's death doesn't signal that the solar energy industry is a fragile entity hanging on through government life support. It shows that this is a robust, rapidly growing, and highly competitive segment, one that has added thousand of jobs while other industries were cutting. Solyndra's problem was that they bet against the rest of the solar industry, insisting that a switch in technology would be required to make solar successful and price competitive. They were wrong. The price per Watt of plain old silicon-based photovoltaic solar has marched steadily downward for years and continues to get both cheaper and better. In many areas, solar is already price competitive with other energy sources. In a few more years, you'll be able to replace "many" with "all." By the end of this decade, it seems likely that solar will displace both coal and natural gas as the cheapest kilowatt on the block, and that's before you factor in the environmental cost of using fossil fuels.
Just as with the microchip industry, where early government contracts and loans were vital in giving manufacturers the markets and money they needed to kickstart a revolution, government programs to boost solar and other renewable energy sources have worked just as intended. Solar got cheap. It's getting cheaper still. It's also becoming more widespread, more readily available, and more familiar to technicians across the country.
The failure of Solyndra shouldn't cast a pall across the solar power industry. It should shine a light on successful and growing high tech companies making and installing their products in America. I know that's not the story the right wants to hear, but hey, if the fall of a poor-widdle-Republican-myth hurts diddum's feelings... I'm okay with that.