Lesley Stahl: Let me interrupt you. You were the government. How many of the loans were you involved in?
Steven Koonin: Difficult to know the exact number. But I would say in the order of 30.
Lesley Stahl: Did you make mistakes?
Steven Koonin: I think I didn’t do as good a job as I could’ve. In retrospect, I would’ve done things a bit differently.
Lesley Stahl: Part of this was supposed to be creating new jobs. Everything I’ve read there were not many jobs created.
Steven Koonin: That’s correct.
Lesley Stahl: So what went wrong there?
Steven Koonin: I didn’t say it would create jobs. Other people did.
Honestly, I did not know what to excerpt. Read the whole thing. Wesley Mouch was, of course, Steven Chu, the Energy Secretary in President Obams’s first term.
Agreed, that cannot be excerpted.
The comments under the article are comically inane.
Yes, the comments under the transcript are a clear sign that someone touched a nerve…
So, are there any guidelines for what makes good shovel-ready?
If no, who can we fire?
If so, who can we fire?
Here’s a former DOE flack defending the energy loan program, for anyone who is interested:
http://www.unz.com/jcole/60-minutes-goes-benghazi-on-cleantech-gets-that-wrong-too/
Nice link, but he’s wrong, of course.
“The key point is that the goal of DOE’s investments is not to make money. The goal is to accelerate the drop in price — and increase in deployment — of clean energy in the market, which it clearly has done in industry after industry. A secondary goal was to create jobs in this country, which it also succeeded in doing.”
Nope. It was the foreign competition undercutting prices that ixnayed jobs for Solyndra. The commenter doesn’t get to have it both ways. If the program is cutting prices (which it isn’t) then you don’t get to claim victory as businesses go bankrupt due to falling prices. And as for the “successes,” sure, give me a guaranteed loan and I could produce some survivors too. That doesn’t make it economically efficient. If we are in a world of falling prices for a technology, that is the time for basic research to accelerate the future, not subsidizing rollouts to lock-in the past.