Ok -- So, we've all read about how the President was flummoxed by Mitt Romney's etch-a-sketch performance and his denial of his own record of policy proposals and pronouncements. We've read how the President didn't want to spend the debate playing the role of fact-checker. The consensus is that the President gave the Romney campaign an undeserved boost by not being more aggressive in challenging Romney's assertions about his own policy programs.
For me, though, Romney's outright lies concerning the President's energy policy record were even more egregious than his distortions of his own proposals. President Obama never challenged Romney, when he introduced misleading and even totally fabricated statistics to attack the Administration's energy policy record. The President's silence in the face of these wildly inaccurate remarks was the most disappointing moment in the debate for me. If the President does not step up to challenge Romney's bogus assertions, the consequences will go well beyond the outcome of the election. It could sabotage efforts of environmentalists and a second Obama Administration (if there is one) to turn our policy focus on the most significant crisis and challenge the human race may have ever faced.
Join me below the squiggle for the Gore-y details....
Sure, much of what Romney said was basically fiction, but when it came to the President's environmental record, Romney just flat-out lied. For me, it was in this discussion that Romney offered his 2 biggest, most blatant and most dangerous lies in the debate. First, Romney said:
“In one year, you provided $90 billion in tax breaks to green energy.”
As Meteor Blades noted Thursday in
his Daily Kos front-page piece:
"He [Romney] also laid this against $2.8 billion in breaks to the fossil fuel industry, the implication being that the Obama administration had provided 30 times as many breaks for green energy as oil and gas have received."
Obama let him get away with and then repeat this nonsense about the $90 billion to the green energy in one year.
I remember that year that we gave $90 billion to green energy....in my wet dreams. There was nothing like that in any budget. The stimulus -- which included many set-asides that still haven't been paid out -- prescribed much of that the form of various projects, including high-speed rail funding (much of it unclaimed by Republican Governors), grants, and lost tax revenue projections for homeowners who weatherized homes or bought energy-star appliances. This money even included billions for "Clean coal" demonstration projects -- the last best hope for the survival of the coal industry -- and more billions to clean up radioactive nuclear power sites.
"The $90 billion figure reflects the total budget for the DOE's Recovery Act program. Only a slim percentage of that money has gone to renewable energy."
The
Washington Post ran a
fact-check piece which detailed about a third of that spending as follows:
"About $3 billion went to carbon capture and storage projects needed to make coal “clean,” a goal Romney shares; about $11 billion went to energy efficiency; about $5 billion went to clean up old nuclear weapons sites; about $4 billion went to modernizing the electricity grid; and about $2 billion went to research and development, which Romney has also supported."
The Department of Energy has a breakdown of its
Recovery Act spending here.
Romney cited this number as if it was real, as if it really reflected spending in some particular year, and as if it was somehow reflective and typical of Obama's budgets. It was, in fact, the one-time stimulus bill, and those amounts reflect project spending and tax deductions which have been claimed over years. If you're at all curious to see proof of that, or curious about details, DoE posts quarterly reports of Recovery Act outlays -- the latest of which is here.
The real spending for green energy in any year under Obama is a fraction of the number Romney cited and repeated.
"It's not $90 billion on solar and wind in one year, but less than two billion on solar, wind, transmission upgrades, electric cars, and other energy innovations over the last three years."
Romney employed this bogus number to try and undercut the President's refrain about eliminating the tax breaks and subsidies that fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil are getting and to suggest that green energy is getting exponentially more support than oil companies and still failing.
Romney said:
"that’s about fifty years of what the oil and gas industry received.”
Remembering of course that Romney was totally distorting what the figure really represented in terms of funding recipients and also the time-span involved, it's worth noting that according to the GAO, "[b]efore the stimulus bill went into effect, federal fossil fuel subsidies outnumbered subsidies for renewable energy by a ratio of 4 to 1."
It's also worth noting that ratio just references one year -- the budget installed by the Bush Administration that was in effect when Obama took office.
In the first decade of this century, according to the Congressional Research Service, DoE's sector-specific energy research and development budget included more money for the oil and gas industry than any other: 27.7%, compared with 16.8% steered toward renewables. While NASA and DoD have also spent billions on R&D into renewables, the government support for renewable energy pales in comparison to the benefits that have accrued on behalf of the fossil fuel industry.
Romney's implication that the federal government is picking winners and losers by advantaging the renewable energy sector over fossil fuels simply is not borne out by the numbers. In fact, a deeper look at historical numbers shows the fossil fuel industry has benefited immensely from government support, giving that sector a deeply entrenched competitive advantage.
If you look at what the oil and gas industry has received in terms of subsidies over the 90 years leading up to the stimulus, even Romney's totally misrepresented $90 billion figure would be a pittance. According to the excellent, often-cited report by Double Bottom Line Venture Capital (which Meteor Blades referenced in his piece), the oil and gas sector has received a jaw-droppng total of $446.9 billion in subsidies. In the years from 1947 to 2009, the nuclear industry benefitted from $185.7 billion in federal government support. In contrast, the renewable energy sector, had received a meager $5.9 billion.
The average annual federal support for oil and gas over the 90 years was $4.86 billion, which contrasts with a total average combined for biofuels (over the 30 years leading into the stimulus bill) and renewables (over the prior 15 years only) under $1.5 billion, less than one-third of the federal average for oil and gas over the century. When one compares support in the nascent years of each sector, it is clear that the support for renewable energy is well below what the federal government supplied to the nuclear industry and also well below the government supports for the oil and gas sector, during the first 15 years of each sector subsidy.
"In inflation-adjusted dollars, nuclear spending averaged $3.3 billion over the first 16 years of subsidy life, and O&G subsidies averaged $1.8 billion, while renewables averaged less than $0.4 billion."
Those numbers also do not include a century of tax subsidies and other support for the oil and gas industry coming from state and local governments.
The biggest whopper was probably Romney's 100% absurd assertion that "about half" of green energy companies failed after getting gov't funds. As Gov. Romney put it:
"And these businesses -- many of them have gone out of business. I think about half of them, of the ones that have been invested in, they've gone out of business."
Meteor Blades' piece summarized the fact-checking on this whopper:
• Romney said: “About half of [the clean energy companies that] have been invested in [by the government] have gone out of business.”
Not even close. Most companies invested in are succeeding. A handful have failed. The default rate on the Department of Energy's $16.1 billion energy loan guarantee program, according to Bloomberg, is at worst, about 3.6 percent. But that is only if none of the guarantee could be recovered from the failed companies. Greg Kats, who worked at the Energy Department from 1994 to 2000, including five years as the department’s director of financing for energy efficiency and renewable energy, said the defaults might rise to as much as five percent, but “I do not see a scenario in which the default rate gets out of single digits.” Michael Grunwald, a Time reporter who wrote the book on the stimulus, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, said Team Romney has told him that the candidate misspoke and didn't mean to say "half." Uh-huh. Grunwald puts the default loss at from around one to two percent.
"About half???" Meaning 50%??? In fact, that assertion isn't just an exaggeration for political effect, it's a monstrous lie that does not bear even the slightest resemblance to the truth. Romney's exaggerated this number by more than ten times the most pessimistic projections. If you look at actual businesses that have actually gone out of business, Romney's exaggerated percentage is about a hundred times larger than the real number. About 50.0%?? Move that decimal point a couple of places, Mitt, and you might be "about" accurate.
Because Romney "misspoke" about the failure rate, he's grossly misleading on the real cost to the federal government of supports for green energy. The $90 billion included a $16 billion green energy loan program. Given the low failure rate that we're seeing -- actually even lower than Congress had projected in the authorization -- most of that money will be paid back. Of course, with respect to the money loaned to failed solar manufacturer Solyndra -- about $500 million -- that is a loss for taxpayers. However, much like the auto bailout, the loan program should be a net plus for federal coffers, both in terms of the interest earned and the tax revenue ultimately generated as a result of the loans. That's not even counting the possibility of astronomical costs in remediation for climate change that might be avoided if the government can play a role in facilitating the transition to a carbon-free energy future.
We will never recover the $2.8 billion in tax breaks that we offer the the oil and gas industry every year. That money just lines the pockets of executives and big shareholders. Moreover, we can't even begin to calculate the costs we will incur on account of the negative impacts that will result from the ongoing reliance on fossil fuels, but it's likely to be in the trillions of dollars, not just billions.
During the debate, my jaw was dropping at these comments. I didn't know the actual numbers, but I was virtually certain that Romney had it wrong, questioning my own knowledge. The thing is, I wasn't 100% sure -- which means they're are a lot of people who reacted with surprise and then thought: "Wow, I didn't know. That's bad. That looks bad for Obama."
Pres. Obama said nothing -- I don't know if he was unsure and wondering if Romney had numbers that he didn't know. Or, maybe Pres. Obama was afraid of defending spending on green energy projects. Either way, I think he needs to get up there and challenge these numbers in the next debates. Whether or not Romney raises this again, Obama must.
Campaign manager David Plouffe suggested that the President might be more aggressive in challenging Romney's false statements in future debates. That's good strategy for the election, but it may leave the Governor's lies about the energy sector untouched.
President Obama has suggested that his biggest task for the next term will be reforming energy policy. If he's going to accomplish that job he needs to start the sales job now. Even if Romney does not raise the issue again, Pres. Obama must affirmatively set the record straight at some point during the next debates. He needs to set the record straight, to correct these most egregious lies about the history of government involvement in the energy sector and about his own record. If he is going to convince the American people to support greater investment in cleaner, greener energy, he will have to set the record straight abut where we are now in his first term, so he can win the debate about where we need to go.