As I reported yesterday, even General Motors is starting to notice what many of us have known for some time – that if the best interests of the American people conflict with Tea Party ideology and the Foxis of Evil, it’s America that gets thrown under the bus.
Intense political heat makes it unlikely any more government loans will be approved before the November election. Congressional Republicans have been scrutinizing various Energy Department loan programs since last fall when Solyndra, a solar panel maker with alleged ties to the Obama Administration, filed for bankruptcy despite receiving a $535 million federal loan guarantee.
There have already been casualties. In January, the Energy Department cancelled a planned loan to the North American subsidiary of Russian steelmaker Severstal to make high-strength steel at a plant in Michigan after Republican lawmakers raised red flags. The Chevrolet Volt has also come under attack from the right, even though it was conceived well before the government bailout of General Motors and was not developed with ATVM loans.
“Solyndra changed the world,” complained Ray Lane, a managing partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Fisker’s major backers, who says the automaker now has no choice but to look to China as a potential source of additional funds. “The Chinese have a lot of money, but they don’t know how to design (electric vehicle) platforms,” he said. Fisker recently hired former Chrysler chief executive Tom LaSorda, who has extensive business contacts in China, to help Fisker move on, with or without help from the U.S. government.
Lane thinks the U.S. is making a mistake by not doing more to ensure advanced vehicle technologies — and the jobs that come with them — stay in this country. “If you believe that in the next few years the car industry is going to become electrified, the U.S. has to take a position on whether we want to own it. My bet is not.”
“Had we known three years ago what we know now, we’d be a Chinese company — and we’d still be in business,…”
I want the government to be vigilant when deciding to whom it’ll loan my tax dollars. And any company whose business model is built around a government loan doesn’t deserve to be in business. But I do think there’s nothing wrong with government giving a temporary leg up to entrepreneurs with promising technologies that will boost American competitiveness in the long run. Other countries do it all the time. The U.S. had better wake up.
In Iceland, they are very lucky that they will be able to run hydrogen-powered cars using fuel derived from water using geothermal energy. This will therefore be an entirely carbon-free form of propulsion.
In the rest of the World, we are going to have to be a bit more clever to cut the Gordian Knot. However, since belief in the Laws of Physics is not optional, we must find a way to generate electricity for anything up to 10 billion people that does not put fossilised carbon into the atmosphere.
We must therefore make out politicians wake-up to the fact that carbon capture and storage – the fossil fuel lobby’s preferred program to allow humanity to abdicate its moral responsibility to leave the planet as it found it – is like putting a sticking plaster on a gaping wound: We are going to have to go ‘cold turkey’; treating the symptoms of our addiction is simply not going to work.