“The Ivanpah project is a shining example of how America is becoming a world leader in solar energy,” said Moniz. It “shows that building a clean energy economy creates jobs, curbs greenhouse gas emissions and fosters American innovation.”

Moniz’s boosterish remarks sound very much like the giddy comments made by his immediate predecessor, former Energy Secretary Steven Chu, when he was in Freemont in 2009 to dedicate the Solyndra solar panel manufacturing plant.

Chu predicted Solyndra’s new plant would “kick off many more” such groundbreakings by clean energy companies, which would usher in “the second industrial revolution.”

However, in 2011 Solyndra went belly up, taking $535 billion in the federal taxpayers’ subsidies with it. While the start-up solar panel manufacturer’s copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) thin-film technology worked well enough, it simply was not economically competitive with conventional, flat silicon panels.

Ivanpah Solar, which was gifted a whopping $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee, has run in to the same problem as Solyndra – its technology is far more expensive than competing technologies.

Indeed, SEGS uses solar thermal power to produce its 392 megawatts. Its “generating system” has more than 300,000 “heliostats” – mirrors to the lay public – spread over 5.5 square miles in the Mohave desert.

The heliostats reflect sunlight onto boilers atop three towers, each of which is reportedly 150 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. The entire complex is said to be visible from the International Space Station.

PV technology

Yet, even the companies that jointly own Ivanpah Solar – BrightSource Energy, NRG Energy and Google — acknowledge that their $2.2 billion clean energy venture has been undercut by photovoltaic technology, which has fallen significantly in price in recent years.

“There’s no doubt,” said NRG Chief Executive Officer David Crane, “in terms of price competitiveness, solar photovoltaic is cheaper.” It represents the future of solar energy, he suggested, not solar thermal generating systems, like Ivanpah.

“What really gets me excited in the morning,” he said, “is that there are 50 million American buildings that should have solar PV on them.”

Quite unintentionally, Crane has made a persuasive argument against government subsidy of clean energy.

The U.S. Energy Department bet $535 billion on CIGS, the technology Solyndra employed to manufacture its thin-film solar panels when the market went with conventional, flat silicon panels.

And Moniz’s department bet $1.6 billion on solar thermal power, the tech used by Ivanpah Solar Energy Generating System, when solar photovoltaic is shaping up as the marketplace winner.

July 1, 2013

By Chris Reed

The Sacramento Bee has joined the reporting staff of The Los Angeles Times and the Ventura County Star’s Timm Herdt in the Fracking Disinformation Hall of Shame. Bee reporter Tom Knudson has a lengthy, often alarmist look at hydraulic fracturing, its long history in California and the possibility that it could trigger a huge economic boom in Golden State.

But while dwelling on fracking’s purported dangers, what Knudson’s article never does is mention the Obama administration’s extensively documented position on fracking: namely, that it is just another heavy industry that can be made safe with good regulations. Instead, Knudson offers up this sort of passing observation as fact: “fracking’s risks to groundwater remain unknown.”

All the president’s men (and women) disagree

Hey, Tom! I know you’re a Pulitzer Prize winner and all, and that therefore you shouldn’t be subject to questioning or editing, but when writing about fracking, aren’t these facts relevant?

— The president’s first energy secretary, Steven Chu, said: “We believe it’s possible to extract shale gas in a way that protects the water, that protects people’s health. We can do this safely.”

— The MIT physicist Obama chose to succeed Chu, Ernest Moniz, described the risks to water posed by fracking as “challenging but manageable.”

— The president’s first Environmental Protection Agency director, Lisa Jackson, told a House committee that she was “not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water.”

— Sally Jewell, the president’s secretary of the interior, at a May 17 news conference announcing the release of fracking rules for public and Indian land, declared the following: “I know there are those who say fracking is dangerous and should be curtailed, full stop. That ignores the reality that it has been done for decades and has the potential for developing significant domestic resources and strengthening our economy and will be done for decades to come.”

Or just for fun, Tom, maybe you could quote the president himself. The photo atop this post of a recent Huffington Post story shows how he feels.

Maybe Tom Knudson got in the green tank for career reasons

The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times both covered Interior Secretary Jewell’s May 17 news conference. The contrast in their coverage is pretty amazing.

“The L.A. Times’ account put in the ‘fracking is safe and has been around forever’ context by quoting an oil industry trade association spokesperson. The NYT quoted THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR!

“Quite a gigantic difference. But than the LAT’s Neela Banerjee and Wes Venteicher and their editors can’t have Times’ readers knowing the Obama administration likes fracking, can they? It doesn’t fit the West L.A.-Marin County-NRDC narrative.”

Maybe that explains the Sac Bee’s Tom Knudson not mentioning the Obama administration’s view on fracking. He’s angling for a job at the L.A. Times.

Sheesh. If any member of the California journalism corps can offer a logical explanation as to why the environmental and political reporters who cover fracking never mention the position of the greenest presidential administration in history, I will be happy to pass it along.

But that won’t happen, because it is impossible to come up with such an explanation.

Paging Dan Walters, paging Dan Walters

The best explanations are the simplest one: 1) All these political and enviro reporters are in the green tank. They’d rather not get blowback from the people they cover, so they don’t mention an angle so powerful it makes the fracking-is-dangerous crowd look like fools. 2) They’re green activists pretending to be impartial journalists.

On fracking, I look forward to Dan Walters eventually fulfilling his periodic role of pointing out the stupidity of the media party line, like he has this year on budget happy talk and like he did back in late 2006 when reporters actually bought the idea that Arnold Schwarzenegger had figured out to make Sacramento functional.

Dan probably won’t name/shame Knudson, but I’ll settle for any improvement on the Sierra Club fracking propaganda we’ve been seeing masquerade as news and “analysis.”

By Chris Reed

The new Los Angeles Times poll showing sharp skepticism among Californians about hydraulic fracturing — the newly improved oil-gas drilling process that has triggered a brown energy revolution — should trigger fierce pride among Times reporters Neela Banerjee, Evan Halper, Julie Cart, Wes Venteicher, Bettina Boxall, Shan Li, Michael J. Mishak, Kathleen Hennessey, Amy Kaufman, Kenneth Turan, Nicole Sperling, Ronald D. White, Tiffany Hsu, Ruben Vives and Michael Hiltzik.

A Nexis hunt shows that over the past year, each of these L.A. Times’ reporters has written about fracking WITHOUT EVER MENTIONING THAT THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION DISMISSES ENVIRONMENTAL CRITICISM OF THE PROCESS.

Why do I uppercase this? Because it is literally incredible that journalists for an important, powerful newspaper think that the position of the greenest president in the history of the nation is irrelevant to one of the most pitched public policy debates in the nation.

Energy and interior secretaries, EPA chief, task force all call it safe

To recycle some of what I’ve written before:

— A task force commissioned by the Obama administration’s Energy Department concluded in a 23-page report issued in November 2011 that fracking was just another heavy industry, one with significant but manageable pollution concerns.

— The president’s first energy secretary, UC Berkeley’s Steven Chu, said: “We believe it’s possible to extract shale gas in a way that protects the water, that protects people’s health. We can do this safely.”

— Chu’s replacement, MIT physicist Ernest Moniz, said the risk that fracking posed to water supplies was “challenging but manageable.”

— The president’s first Environmental Protection Agency director, Lisa Jackson, disputed claims that fracking, which occurs 5,000 feet below the surface, had polluted water tables which are usually less than 1,000 feet below the surface. She testified before a House committee that she was “not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water.”

Neela Banerjee: Serial factual omitter

The single most graphic example of the fact that there is a calculated decision made to not mention the Obama administration’s views comes from a recent article by Neela Banerjee — who has written more than any other LATer about fracking — and Wes Venteicher. Published on May 17, it dealt with Sally Jewell, Obama’s interior secretary, and her announcement of new federal fracking rules for drilling on public and Indian lands.

Banerjee and Venteicher noted the controversy over fracking and turned to an industry spokesman to offer the context that fracking has been around decades and hasn’t been the devil.

“‘States have been successfully regulating fracking for decades, including on federal lands, with no incident of contamination that would necessitate redundant federal regulation,’ said Kathleen Sgamma, vice president of government and public affairs for Western Energy Alliance, a Denver-based trade group.”

The New York Times covered the same press conference and, like Banerjee and Venteicher, also quoted Jewell. But while the LAT offered mushy generalities from the interior secretary, veteran NYT reporter John M. Broder believed it was somewhat more significant that she said this:

“Anticipating criticism from environmental advocates, she said: ‘I know there are those who say fracking is dangerous and should be curtailed, full stop. That ignores the reality that it has been done for decades and has the potential for developing significant domestic resources and strengthening our economy and will be done for decades to come.’”

Fracking safety: NYT cites Obama Cabinet member, LAT quotes flack

How does Banerjee sleep at night, slanting things this dramatically? When trying to steer the public toward an opinion on fracking’s safety, she quotes an oil industry flack. The New York Times quotes OBAMA’S SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR. And it’s a quote the LAT reporter could have used but chose to ignore.

I rest my case.

By Chris Reed

The debate over hydraulic fracturing — using high-powered water cannons to reach natural gas and oil reserves deep underground — is heating up in California, driven by the vast economic potential of the Monterey shale formation under vast swaths of the state.

Last month, a committee of the California Legislature passed three bills targeting “fracking.” A Nexis account shows hundreds of mentions of hydraulic fracturing in state newspapers over the past 12 months.

Given the extent of media interest and the high stakes for the state’s economy, one would think the Obama administration’s position on the safety of fracking would be central to coverage of California’s possible expanded use of the energy-exploration process. The president, after all, is broadly seen as the greenest president in history, using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and his executive powers to advance far-reaching regulations.

Just another heavy industry with ‘challenging but manageable’ pollution

It would thus seem to be highly relevant that:

— A task force commissioned by the Obama administration’s Energy Department concluded in a 23-page report issued in November 2011 that fracking was just another heavy industry, one with significant but manageable pollution concerns.

— The president’s first energy secretary, UC Berkeley’s Steven Chu, said: “We believe it’s possible to extract shale gas in a way that protects the water, that protects people’s health. We can do this safely.”

— Chu’s replacement, MIT physicist Ernest Moniz, said the risk that fracking posed to water supplies was “challenging but manageable.”

— The president’s first Environmental Protection Agency director, Lisa Jackson, disputed claims that fracking, which occurs 5,000 feet below the surface, had polluted water tables which are usually less than 1,000 feet below the surface. She testified before a House committee that she was “not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water.”

It is true that the White House has prevented fossil-fuel exploration on federal lands, which perhaps can be interpreted as opposition to fracking. But at a very basic level, the Obama administration has disagreed with the central claims of the anti-fracking campaign, which build on the idea that the process is new, unproven and hugely destructive to the environment.

Plenty of coverage — but none of it mentions Obama administration’s view

Here is a short list of recent California newspaper coverage that mentions greens’ warnings about hydraulic fracturing but never acknowledges that the Obama administration is on record as essentially dismissing greens’ claims and supporting fracking’s use:

— A May 9 column in the Ventura County Star by Timm Herdt headlined, “Drilling for a middle ground on fracking.”

— A May 2 story in the San Francisco Chronicle headlined, “Fracking in drought regions a bad recipe.”

— A May 1 column in the Sacramento Bee by Dan Morain headlined, “Calculating the profits, pitfalls of an oil tax.”

— An April 29 story in the Ventura County Star headlined, “Assembly committee passes three bills to impose fracking moratorium.”

—An April 20 story in the Ventura County Star headlined, “New leases reveal an oil land rush in Ventura County.”

— An April 13 story in the Los Angeles Times headlined, “Report urges tough rules on fracking.”

— An April 11 editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle headlined, “Ground rules: On fracking.”

— An April 10 story in the Los Angeles Times headlined, “California Senate panel approves bill to regulate ‘fracking’.”

— An April 9 story in the San Francisco Chronicle headlined, “Foes of fracking win case — delay in drilling likely.”

This list could be far longer. I have been following the fracking issue intensely in California for a year and have never seen a newspaper story that even mentioned the Obama administration’s views in passing.

The juicy angle on greens and fracking that’s never shared with public

It’s impossible to know if ideology or groupthink or a combination of both is driving this bizarre omission of basic facts from fracking coverage. But one way or the other, it’s indefensible as journalism — especially because of the juicy story that awaits telling by the mainstream media:

Hydraulic fracturing has been a common tool in oil and gas exploration since the 1970s, and has been around since the late 1940s. It was only after it became a much more efficient and refined process in the last decade and began generating vast amounts of natural gas and oil that environmentalists began to object to it.

But this increased efficiency has also made fracking cleaner and less wasteful than ever. Less water is used, more is recycled — and there’s a race on to improve recycling technology.

Isn’t that worthy of coverage? That greens didn’t object to the much dirtier version of fracking for decades but only griped when it got efficient — and much cleaner?

Of course it is.

But if this juicy, important, obvious angle ever appears in the Times, Mercury-News, Bee or Chronicle, it will likely come as a complete surprise to subscribers. California’s environmental reporters simply refuse to cover the big picture on fracking.

By Chris Reed

It’s bad enough that the media consistently depict hydraulic fracturing as new when it’s been around for 60-plus years. But what’s also amazing is that the California media covering the state government’s ongoing attempts to develop “fracking” regulations — including occasional contrarian Dan Walters — never mention the fact that the Obama administration has basically said full speed ahead. The U.S. Energy Department accepts the consensus of regulators over the past 40 years that fracking to access oil and natural gas reserves is just another heavy industry — one that’s fairly dirty but manageable.

I made this point in a U-T San Diego editorial which noted fracking’s immense potential to create an economic boom in the Golden State:

“What few seem to understand, and what the media have rarely emphasized, is that the Obama administration dismisses [environmentalists’] alarmism about fracking … .

“This is why the president’s first energy secretary, Steven Chu, said: ‘We believe it’s possible to extract shale gas in a way that protects the water, that protects people’s health. We can do this safely.’

“This is why the MIT physicist the White House recently nominated to succeed Chu, Ernest Moniz, described the risks to water posed by fracking as ‘challenging but manageable.’

“This is why the president’s first Environmental Protection Agency director, Lisa Jackson, told a House committee that she was ‘not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water.’”

Have you seen this context in any MSM story about California’s regulation of fracking?

Nah.

The same pathetic bunch that ignored the downside of AB 32 until this year has ignored the fact that fracking has Obama’s blessing.

Pretty amazing.

By Chriss Street

President Obama’s expected naming of Ernest J. Moniz as the next secretary of energy is good news for energy producers and consumers, especially those in California. It represents the recognition that oil and gas development is the only potential revenue source available for the administration to avoid the type of austerity spending cuts sweeping Europe.

Moniz’s expected nomination, if confirmed, also could boost energy production in California, generating new tax revenue that could ease the state’s budget problems.

Moniz is a respected expert on electrical energy and currently serves as the director of MIT’s Energy Initiative, a research group that is heavily funded by the oil and gas industry. The outgoing energy secretary, Steven Chu, pushed hard for job-killing cap-and-trade legislation, and the prohibition of exploration on federal lands. And he wasted billions of dollars on sustainable energy boondoggles, such as the bankrupt Solyndra of Fremont, Calif. — a $535 million hit to taxpayers. Chu, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, failed to mention the Solyndra boondoggle in his farewell letter.

With public employees panicking over sequestration spending cuts scheduled to begin in early March, the Obama administration seems poised to triangulate away from its radical environmentalist friends to embrace oil and gas fracking in places like California’s massive Monterey Shale formation to protect union jobs.

Avoiding Greece

The European PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) have been forced by the International Monetary Fund, dominated by the United States, into austerity programs that raise taxes, slash crony spending and eliminate union featherbedding.  But after four years of draconian austerity, the Greek Finance Ministry reported the tiny nation saw tax collections fall 15 percent over last year.

It seems that, if you raise taxes, businesses deplete their cash reserves, curtail reinvestment and postpone payments to their own vendors.  Economists refer to this phenomenon as austerity’s self-reinforcing “cycle of pain.”  As tax collection falls, governments raise tax rates further, perpetuating another cycle of pain.

The most recent Congressional Budget Office’s projections estimate the U.S. federal deficit will climb by $7 to $9 trillion over the next 10 years.  If these deficits actually happened, the United States eventually would suffer a monumental debt crisis.  But unlike tiny Greece, which can ask for aid from the IMF, there is no entity large enough that could or would bail out the United States.

To address America’s debt and spending crisis, Congress raised some taxes last month and set automatic spending cuts, known as the sequestration, that become effective next month.  The pain is structured to be shared equally between the military and the welfare state with 9.7 percent cut in defense, 7.3 percent in non-defense and 2 percent for Medicare spending.

Anticipating coming crunch, government spending fell at an annual 6.6 percent rate in the last quarter of 2012, driven by a 22.2 percent decline in defense spending.  This subtracted 1.33 percentage points from the economy.  Vendors to government cut their rate of inventory accumulation, slashing another 1.27 percentage points of GDP.  The combination of these factors slowed the economy by at a 2.5 percent annual rate, a small economic contraction.

President Obama is getting lots of grief from public sector unions regarding the potential size of the sequester layoffs.  Under the Executive Branch of the federal government, he controls 1,942,528 “permanent employees” and 167,675 “temporary employees.” The U.S. Postal Service is off-budget as self-funding, but it now is dumping Saturday services.

Unions could decide to share the sequestration pain to save jobs. But the Office of Personnel Management guidance calculates all federal employees then would be forced to take a 22 days of unpaid furlough a year to meet sequestration cuts.

The U.S. Army estimates that 78 percent of its combat brigades will be forced to skip training due to sequester.  Director Douglas Elmendorf of the bi-partisan Congressional Budget Office recently warned that too high spending cuts will undermine the already weak economic recovery.

Steven Chu was the tip of Obama’s spear to push “public investment” schemes in wind and solar energy, while fighting against fracking and other new petroleum drilling innovations.  When Chu was appointed four years ago, crude oil’s price hovered around $37 to $40 per barrel. Today it sits at around $95.  With the shale boom driving huge tax collections for certain states, federal unions looking to get in on the gravy train helped push Chu out.

Moniz

Moniz looks to be the ideal choice as Secretary of Energy.  He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as undersecretary of energy during the Clinton Administration and his academic credentials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are stellar.  He strongly advocates that developing low-cost natural gas for electricity is a “bridge fuel” to lower carbon pollution.

In Meeting Energy Challenges: Technology and Policy, Moniz wrote:

“Adequate electricity supplies are central to economic growth and quality of life…. In the industrialized world, capacity needs to be increased in a manner consistent with the strict reliability requirements of the digital economy. In addition, outdated infrastructures need to be modernized, and suitable mechanisms for market deregulation need to be developed.

America is on the cusp of an energy independence that will drive prices down and spur a new manufacturing boom.  Obama may be appointing a pro-energy secretary of energy to drive tax revenue up to save public sector union jobs, including those in California.

CHRISS STREET & PAUL PRESTON

Present “The American Exceptionalism Radio Talk Show”
Streaming Live Monday through Friday at 7-10 PM
Click here to listen:  http://www.mysytv.net/kmyclive.html
Go to their Websites:  www.aexnn.com and www.agenda21radio.com

By Chris Reed

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s offbeat request last week on his Facebook page for the public to tell him what to write about in his pending memoirs got the result he wanted: lots of attention.

“More than 2,000 people responded: Talk about bodybuilding, your childhood and your time on movie sets, they wrote,” said an account in the Sacramento Bee. “Talk about politics. And sex.”

But the former governor’s upcoming book is unlikely to truthfully detail perhaps the most profound and far-reaching action of Schwarzenegger’s life: his decision to betray Californians and saddle their economy with a permanent burden because of his determination to be remembered as a green icon.

I refer to Schwarzenegger’s 2006 decision to embrace and sign AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 — a bill forcing California utilities to switch to cleaner but much costlier forms of energy and establishing a cap-and-trade pollution credits market for heavy industries.

The state media’s amazingly incompetent and biased coverage of AB 32 treats it as an open question whether forcing California businesses to pay much higher costs for energy than firms in rival states and nations will help them or hurt them. Reporters covering energy and the environment also never mention the very related fact that one of the main rationales for AB 32 — that it would inspire the rest of America and the rest of the world to copy the Golden State in fighting global warming — never came to pass.

The result is that as AB 32 is phased in, California products will have an increasingly large competitive disadvantage because of the de facto green energy surcharge their price includes.

Congress has figured out it’s not a good policy for the United States to go it alone in switching to costlier but cleaner energy. It’s why cap-and-trade legislation died in 2009 — when Democrats still controlled both the House and Senate.

The Obama administration also understands go-it-alone is folly. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu put it in stark terms in March 2009 congressional testimony. He said that if a United States switch to cleaner energy wasn’t copied by other nations, the United States should essentially start a trade war by putting tariffs on their products to erase the competitive disadvantage the United States suffered for trying to save the world from climate change.

Economic suicide

And while Schwarzenegger never gets in the way of his self-aggrandizing Global Green Giant narrative, there is plenty of evidence that he too knows go-it-alone verges on economic suicide. In 2006, he forced legislators to include a provision allowing the governor to suspend AB 32 if the economy were in poor shape. In March 2010, in a letter to the California Air Resources Board that the reliably buffoonish state media ignored, Schwarzenegger even hinted that it might be a good idea to delay implementing AB 32 until it were part of a larger national climate-change policy.

The law should be integrated “as seamlessly as possible into a comprehensive national strategy,” he wrote. “Given the importance of interstate and international trade to California’s economy, we must design our program to ensure that California companies are appropriately positioned to compete under any future federal or international program.”

Nine months later, Schwarzenegger left the governor’s office, determined to buff his image as a green idol and never again to offer the slightest hint that AB 32 was anything but the greatest single act of leadership since President Truman embraced the Marshall Plan. Ever since, he’s traveled the world to accept kudos for his great foresight and brilliant leadership in saving the planet.

Uninspiring

Except that AB 32 didn’t inspire the rest of the world. As a result, it won’t reduce the emissions that are believed by many scientists to contribute to global warming. Instead, such emissions are surging, not receding — especially in China and India, the very nations that are likely to be California’s most significant trade rivals in the 21st century. Nations that will enjoy a permanent competitive advantage over the Golden State — much cheaper energy — because of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Will this be mentioned in Arnold’s memoirs? Of course not. But in time, as the evidence grows that California’s extremely costly energy kills jobs — and reduces disposable income for those with jobs — AB 32’s destructive futility will be impossible to ignore.

The green cultists in the state media — the ones who unlike Congress and Steven Chu couldn’t figure out that self-imposed competitive disadvantages are a bad thing — will be the last ones to abandon Arnold’s ship. But the permanent California recession that AB 32 is likely to create will be impossible for the rest of us to ignore.

All because an egomaniacal action star turned politician was desperate for a legacy.

I have no idea what pun or spin will be used in the title of Schwarzenegger’s memoirs. But I know what the title would be were I the author: “Benedict Arnold.”