Solyndra and the Scandal of Tomorrowland

Hot Air ^ | 10/3/11 | Karl

[Nachum]

Megan McArdle, explaining why the federal loan guarantee to the now-bankrupt solar company Solyndra is more venture socialism than venture capitalism, concluded:

[T]his isn’t much like a VC. Or anything else that makes financial sense in the private sector. It’s like… the government giving money to companies that sound whizzy.

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds added: “A more cynical explanation is that the ‘sound whizzy’ is just meant to be a distraction from what’s really no more than a payoff to political supporters.” When the history of the Solydra debacle is fully written, Prof. Reynolds may well be correct about the political payoff angle. However, our sprawling federal government offer myriad opportunities for political payoffs, so it’s worth examining why the Obama administration would throw hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars at things that “sound whizzy.” To invoke a Beltway cliche, a scandal may be what is legal more than what is illegal. The Solyndra case sheds light on the larger Scandal of Tomorrowland.

Before Solyndra went bust, solar industry leaders would frankly admit to friendly media that “the growth of their US operations is vitally dependent upon a fragile matrix of government support — state renewable portfolio standards and federal tax credits, grants and construction loan guarantees.” (There are echoes of Obamacare here, with government mandates and government subsidies propping up a Potemkin marketplace.) There are at least three major reasons solar fails as a feasible alternate energy source — diffuseness, cost and unreliability — and little progress has been made in addressing them. For example, regarding diffuseness, environmentalists have already opposed efforts to build large solar plants in the Mojave desert. On the issue of cost:

[ronnie raygun]

The deliberate looting of America, plain and simple! In the front door and out the back. Why is jail only good for Brene Madoff?