Ryan's Green Energy Lies

Paul Ryan in the October 11, 2012 debate repeated Romney’s lies about the green energy program. ThinkProgress addressed Ryan’s comment in their October 12 article - Ryan admitted to taking money and he was not alone, he joined at least 62 Congressional Republicans who actively lobbied the government for loan guarantees and grants for clean energy companies in their districts — even while many of them publicly railed against the stimulus program that provided a boost to local companies and organizations around the country. Ryan then threw in one last punch at the end of the exchange: “Was it a good idea to spend taxpayer dollars on electric cars in Finland, or on windmills in China?” he asked. This might have been a little jab, but it was loaded with some big inaccuracies. The first “electric cars in Finland” comment is based upon a made up story pushed by Fox News and conservative bloggers that a Department of Energy (DoE) loan guarantee to Fisker Automotive was being used to build cars overseas. In fact, all of the money used through the loan guarantee went toward building a US manufacturing facility. There were some jobs created in Finland during final assembly of electric vehicles but that was announced up front in 2009 when the loan was issued. According to the DoE all of the money set aside for Fisker’s next-generation vehicle manufacturing was issued for American operations.

Ryan’s “windmills in China” comment is based on a 2010 Washington Times piece that cited a story from American University finding stimulus dollars going to some foreign companies developing projects within the US. The piece said “It should be noted there were no farms that we could find that used turbines entirely built in China, so we can’t say for sure how much of this stimulus money went to create jobs in China. Some money definitely did but it is safe to say more money went to creating jobs in the US and Europe.” The driver of this issue was the lack of a sophisticated supply chain for wind components and turbines in the US. This is exactly what the stimulus package was designed to do — encourage more development activity which would in turn spur more domestic manufacturing. And it worked. In 2006 wind turbine manufacturers were only able to source about 35% of components from American companies. Today, with 500 manufacturing facilities now in operation around the country, manufacturers are sourcing 67% of components from American companies — a doubling of domestic content in the last 5 years. But facts don’t seem to matter during this campaign. Even though we’ve doubled wind manufacturing in this country and doubled production of renewable electricity the industry is still being used as an attack punch line.