Green Jobs Plan

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to discuss what I have seen happen now over the last 100 days of the Biden administration, and that is President Biden seems to be doubling down on some of the failures of the Obama administration.

Last week, as the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, I released a report, and it is called ``Solyndra Syndrome and the Green Stimulus Delusion.'' Solyndra syndrome.

I tell you, I think it is an important thing to highlight because this 20-page report really is an in-depth look at the failed green energy policies under the Obama administration. Now what we are seeing is President Biden is determined, in my opinion, to repeat them, on a much larger scale.

In 2009, under the direction of President Obama, Democrats passed a partisan stimulus spending bill. The legislation included $90 billion for green job training, for green energy loans, and for high-speed rail. It also included about $3 billion for a program more commonly referred to now as ``Cash for Clunkers.''

The goal was to produce millions of green energy jobs. They wanted to do it by investing taxpayer dollars in emerging green energy companies and also subsidizing new vehicles.

So what did American taxpayers get for all of this money? What did they get as a return on this hefty investment? Well, they didn't get the promised jobs. They got boondoggles. Billions of taxpayer dollars wound up wasted on green tech companies through loans or grants. Several of the companies then failed.

The most famous of these was, of course, Solyndra. This was a solar panel company with many personal ties to the administration. It was located in California and received over $500 million in government- backed loans. Vice President Biden, at the time Vice President, was actually the one who announced that Solyndra would receive hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Well, not too long after that, headlines across the Nation told the story of what happened next. In September of 2011, the company failed miserably. More than 1,000 workers lost their jobs. Almost all of the 535 million taxpayer dollars were lost.

The leadership of Solyndra lied about the company's value and what they could produce. It also turns out they were big political donors to the Obama-Biden campaign and the Democrats.

While the Obama-Biden donors got millions of grant money, taxpayers back then were left holding the bag. It was a terrible green gamble, and it had gone terribly wrong.

It wasn't the only one of these projects. Other companies like A123 Systems, Beacon Power, Ener1, Fisker Automotive all received big government-backed loans, and they all went bankrupt.

The waste didn't stop at loans for private companies. No, the Obama administration gave a $3.5 billion grant to California for a high-speed rail project. This was California's planned bullet train, and it was supposed to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

Let's fast forward 10 years and see where we are with that bullet train. After skyrocketing project costs, the Governor of California has recently thrown in the towel. Only a fraction of the original project is going to be completed, and delays continue to be announced.

So you might ask: Well, why are they completing a small fraction of this railroad, this high-speed bullet train that was supposed to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco? Well, by completing a small part of the original project, California can avoid having to pay back the taxpayers of the Nation--more wasted money.

Americans clearly remember Cash for Clunkers. What a program that was. It gave subsidies to folks for the purchase of a new greener vehicle as a way to stimulate auto sales and auto industry jobs. The big problem was it didn't work. One analysis found that the Cash for Clunkers Program created one job for every $1.4 million spent. That is quite a lot of money for a single job. The program itself was a clunker, and it spent way too much taxpayer cash.

The list goes on and on, as I have outlined in this report. The Obama administration frittered away billions of taxpayer dollars. They chose people close to the administration to receive the money. The economy remained sluggish, and the taxpayers got fleeced.

There actually was one bright economic spot during the great recession, and, of course, I will tell you that was the oil and gas sector in this country. By the end of 2013, nonfarm employment was an anemic 1.9 percent higher than it had been at the end of the year in 2009. In contrast, the oil and gas sector's employment was 16 percent higher. While the rest of the economy was stuck in the mud, the oil and gas sector was growing and creating American jobs. That robust job growth helped make America energy independent and secure.

You would think that the lessons from the failed 2009 stimulus and the U.S. energy boom would be obvious and would be repeated today, but the Biden administration seems blinded by the Solyndra syndrome. President Biden wants to use the exact same playbook now and this time with a much heftier pricetag.

The President wants to spend trillions of dollars, not just billions. Included in that spending would be hundreds of billions of dollars in green job training programs, green energy financing, increased high- speed rail, new electric vehicles. It is the same plan that failed under President Obama.

At the same time the Biden administration is recycling the farfetched so-called jobs plan, the Biden administration is attacking oil and gas jobs--good jobs that people have today.

On his first day in office, President Biden signed an Executive order to kill the Keystone XL Pipeline. Now, this eliminated the prospect of 11,000 American jobs. Making matters worse, President Biden implemented a ban on new oil and gas production on public lands, a huge impact on my home State of Wyoming. A permanent ban on oil and gas leasing on Federal lands could destroy up to 1 million jobs across America.

My report finds the Biden administration is pushing expensive fantasy jobs and killing real ones at a time that America cannot afford to lose these jobs. It is a recipe for repeated disaster.

We all remember how President Obama promised shovel-ready jobs, and he then later admitted that the jobs weren't coming, as he said, because ``shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.''

We know we can expect the same thing this time. The expensive, wasteful job-killing Solyndra syndrome is back. It was a terrible idea in 2009. And here we are a dozen years later, once again, spending a lot more, and doing that on the same bad ideas is now even worse than before.

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