[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 80 (Monday, May 10, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2408-S2409]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                            Green Jobs Plan

  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.

[[Page S2409]]

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.
  I yield the floor.

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