Romney's Green Energy Claims Were Completely Wrong, But That Hardly Matters

Mitt Romney made some interesting energy statements in the first debate, but the one that’s gotten the most props for its epic zinger status was his claim that “half” of $90 billion dollars spent by the Obama administration on clean-energy projects went to bankrupt companies. That statement has already been repeatedly proven to be hogwash.

Of that $90 billion, around $30 billion went to energy efficiency measures, and $10 billion went to modernizing our broken grid. As Media Matters explains, even the part of that budget left was delivered to startups with a high rate of success:

Even if Romney was referring only to the clean energy loan program funded under the stimulus, he still got it completely wrong. The New York Times called it “a gross overstatement,” noting that “of nearly three dozen recipients of loans under the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, only three are currently in bankruptcy.” In fact, over 87 percent of the funds for the Department of Energy’s 1705 loan guarantee program went to low-risk power generation projects, which are required to secure contracts with power purchasers before receiving a loan guarantee, virtually eliminating the risk of default. Congress anticipated that not all companies would succeed, and a Bloomberg Government analysis suggests they set aside more than enough to cover losses — $2.47 billion, not $90 billion.

Romney’s claims were totally baseless; Obama did not “pick losers,” and Tesla is not Solyndra. But the media response to Romney’s statements demonstrates how successful the “winners and losers” storyline has propagated. Fox News was, of course, gleeful in its support, but the shift elsewhere has been more subtle.

The green energy initiatives supported by the administration are clearly not losers, as shown by the numbers. Yet look at the headlines: How many variations of “Are green [thing] losers?” are there? The casual viewer is going to go with whatever sounds right, and months of hammering away at the Solyndra storyline has paid off with false statements sounding maybe kinda right.

Romney successfully turned irrefutable numbers into thousands of column-inches of questions, fact-checking, and other runaround that gives the impression that there’s even a discussion to be had. That type of obfuscation, more than Obama’s sleepiness or Romney’s confident orating, will be the lasting impact of the campaign.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.