Well he did say that half the recipients failed and that a bald faced lie. Nowhere near half the companies failed and the stimulus was not just about these green subsidies. The fact checkers are going over this one already and the Boston Globe Blog has a link to the breakdown;
$29 billion for energy efficiency, including $5 billion for improvements in the homes and apartments of low-income households
$21 billion for renewable electricity generation, including wind turbines and solar panels
$10 billion for grid modernization, including millions of “smart meters” that read themselves, eliminating the need for meter readers
$6 billion to help establish factories to make batteries for electric cars and other components of advanced vehicles
$18 billion for fast trains
$3 billion for research and development into capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide
$3 billion for job training and scientific advances in green energy
About $2 billion to help build wind turbines, solar panels and similar “green” products
As you can see, much is loans that will be paid back, more is hardly green but cleaning up the mess we've already made and some is for "clean coal." Over at the
Washington Post Blog.
The Energy Department put $90 billion worth of grants, loan guarantees and loans into what it calls a “clean energy” economy. But that money is spread widely: 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. DOE has a breakdown here
I guess the Republicans think they have screamed "Solyndra" so many times that they can now extend it to half of $90 billion.
Romney: “Now I like green energy as well, but that’s about fifty years of what the oil and gas industry received.”
By contrast, the $2.8 billion in tax breaks the oil and gas firms receive each year represent money the federal government will not recover. Before the stimulus bill went into effect, federal fossil fuel subsidies outnumbered subsidies for renewable energy by a ratio of 4 to 1, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Those figures also don’t take into account the infrastructure the federal government has financed over the past century that has aided the fossil fuel industry, including the railroads Obama touted during the debate.
And there are plenty more ways to rip that lie apart. Making that $29 billion for energy efficiency sound like a bad thing, make Romney eat those words.