Month: March 2012

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.

Forbes:

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.

They were doing all the right things.

Giving money to the Heartland Institute. Being “job creators”. Making American number one in car production again. Why is the right wing noise machine saying all those terrible things about GM?

SF Chronicle:

For some GOP members of Congress, the Chevy Volt, made by General Motors, is a fire hazard and a job loser, while Palo Alto’s Tesla Motors is a crony capitalist purveyor of toy cars for Silicon Valley millionaires.

The campaign has tainted Energy Secretary and UC Berkeley physicist Steven Chu and his agency’s renewable energy loan programs, rupturing a consensus under former President George W. Bush, who started the programs to end America’s addiction to oil.

But it may not stop the electric car. The assault has enraged General Motors. On March 1, the company opened an unprecedented campaign to re-introduce the Volt in California, the biggest U.S. auto market, even as it temporarily halted production because of slow sales.

‘It’s all on us’

GM Chief Executive Officer Dan Akerson has complained about the political atmosphere that surrounds the Volt.

“Sometimes I feel bad for President Obama,” he said this month after an appearance at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. “This car was designed and committed to well before he was president, and it’s called the ‘Obamacar.’ It’s not the Obama car. I’m proud and I’m pleased that he thinks highly of it, but it’s all on us. It’s not a political issue.”
–

Showing photos of a charred Volt, a panel of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista (San Diego County), held a hearing in January called “Volt Vehicle Fire: What Did NHTSA Know and When Did They Know It.”

But no Volt has caught fire on the road. There are no recalls. The car was deemed safe by the National Transportation Safety Board. The fire occurred during testing and was likely the result of testers at the safety board failing to drain the battery of a mutilated test vehicle before storing it.

By comparison, 258,500 gasoline vehicles caught fire between 2004 and 2006, according to federal statistics.

Even Über-troglodyte Bob “global warming is a crock of shit” Lutz is having second thoughts on the Axis of Error. Writing in Forbes this week, he sounds surprised that right wing talking heads are dumping on GM and saying things he knows are untrue..

Forbes August 12:

So, the latest update: two nights ago, the imperious, self-glorifying O’Reilly, unquestioned ruler of the “No Spin Zone,” once again kicked the “Volt” around and proclaimed “several have caught fire.”

Let me reiterate:

1) The Volt was largely my idea, and I was its undeniable champion. Work on it was started in 2006. Obama was elected in 2008.

2) No Volt in service has ever shown as much as a wisp of smoke. Not in normal service, and not in crashes. The three Volt battery fires all occurred under extremely destructive experimental conditions. Two of the fires were induced in batteries not mounted in in cars.

3) Those who know me will vouch for my credentials as a conservative and vocal global warming skeptic. I spent 11 years as a Marine attack aviator trained and ready to take out Communists during the Cold War.

That’s the truth, whether “no spin O’Reilly” likes it or not.

Meanwhile, the dastardly, communist Volt’s rebadged sister car, the Opel Ampera, was just selected as European Car of the Year by 59 of Europe’s leading automotive journalists. But what do they know? They’re only Europeans! (Incidentally, it’s the first time in history that an American-engineered and produced car has won European Car of the Year. A source of national pride? No … according to the Right-heads, a reason for shame!)

(Bob – they’re a bunch of surrender monkies eating brie and cheese – so there!)

Continue reading ““Who will I believe now?” – GM Shocked! to find out that Conservative Media Lies”

More from Mike’s ongoing book tour to support The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.
Reminiscent of the tactics of the Bush administration, the Canadian government is preventing leading climate scientists from speaking to the public about their work.
While he was in Toronto to promote his new book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, The Mark sat down with eminent climate scientist Michael E. Mann

Mitt Romney pandered to yet another bogus right wing shibboleth, the so-called “light bulb ban”

Washington Post: 

“And the government would have banned Thomas Edison’s light bulb. Oh yeah, Obama’s regulators actually did just that.”

— Mitt Romney, March 19, 2012

During an economic speech on Monday, the former Massachusetts governor and presidential hopeful charged that the Obama administration “banned” Thomas Edison’s light bulb.

Really? Let’s take a look at this contentious issue.

The Facts

Thomas Edison did not invent the incandescent light bulb, but he did make it commercially viable, filing his first patent for improvements in 1878. And, then 129 years later, President George W. Bush signed into law the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

The bill passed both Houses of Congress with big bipartisan votes — 264 to 163 in the House of Representatives and 65 to 27 in the Senate. When Bush signed it, he lauded it for including “revisions to improve energy efficiency in lighting and appliances.”

One of those revisions included minimum efficiency standards, requiring common light bulbs use at least 25 percent less electricity. The regulations were due to take effect for 100 watt bulbs at the beginning of 2012, but a nine-month delay in enforcement was added in an agreement to avoid a government shutdown late last year.

Incandescent bulbs are remarkably inefficient, converting less than 10 percent of the energy they use into light and more than 90 percent into heat. As the Congressional Research Service put it, “some critics refer to traditional incandescent bulbs as ‘resistance heaters that also give off light.’”  So the new law was designed to save billions of dollars in electricity costs and reduce carbon emissions.

The law does not ban or specifically prohibit incandescent light bulbs, but they must meet the new efficiency standards. As a practical matter, that means many of the cheap bulbs now being sold will no longer be manufactured as they are replaced by new, more efficient bulbs.

The up-front cost of the new bulbs is likely to be higher, but over time the bulbs are supposed to pay for themselves because they lose less energy and do not need to be replaced as often.

Moreover, the industry is already responding, not just to the U.S. law but similar efficiency standards that have been mandated in countries around the world. American manufacturers have invested millions of dollars to meet the law’s requirements and are not about to change course now.

Getting back to Romney’s comment, it’s a little difficult to know how Edison would have responded to today’s regulations, though, as Plum Line noted, Edison was a Republican back in the days when Republicans favored more regulation than Democrats.

But it is simply incorrect to say that “Obama’s regulators” banned the incandescent bulb.

Clearly Mitt didn’t have anyone contact Edison’s great grandson, who recently wrote in Politico:

If my great-grandfather, Thomas Edison, were alive today, I have no doubt he’d view Congress as most Americans do — with anger and disgust. His reasons would be personal, however. The House Republicans’ effort to stifle lighting innovation flies in the face of everything this great American innovator and path-breaking businessman stood for.

So what’s the light bulb kerfuffle about? Starting Jan. 1, the bulbs you buy must be more efficient and use less electricity, under a 2007 law signed by President George W. Bush.

This would have thrilled my great-grandfather. Edison was one of history’s most prolific inventors, with nearly 1,100 patents involving electricity, the phonograph, one of the first ticker tapes and much more.

Many, if not most, of his inventions involved making things work better and more efficiently. He would have been at the forefront of efforts to do the same with his light bulb. After all, innovation and invention defined him.

Somehow, though, this new efficiency law is being demonized and misrepresented by a small group of political ideologues in and out of Congress. They have spun a fear-mongering tale that has left some Americans confused and frightened. There are crazy claims that incandescent light bulbs will be banned, and that Big Brother government is running your life.

This is nonsense. The new standards don’t outlaw the incandescent bulb. Instead, they have spurred much needed innovation and improvements — the kind Edison loved. You are still able to buy incandescent bulbs. The difference is they will use less electricity and cut energy costs.

Luckily, House Republicans’ latest effort to derail this with a legislative rider that defunds enforcement for a few months amounts to little more than a speed bump on the road to the light bulb revolution.