Friday, September 30, 2011

How Many Nobel Laureates Did It Take to Give Solyndra $1/2 Billion?

Add Steven Chu to the list.

Energy Secretary Chu is really, really good at cooling atoms with laser light, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1997.

It doesn't look like he is doing quite so well making his brother Nobel Laureate, Barack Obama, look like the coolest president ever.

From The Washington Post:
Energy Secretary Steven Chu acknowledged Thursday making the final decision to allow a struggling solar company to continue receiving taxpayer money after it had technically defaulted on a $535 million federal loan guaranteed by his agency.
Solyndra's loan default might have been a red flag to an Energy Secretary out to protect taxpayer money, but Chu hadn't made that his first priority. In fact he "restructured Solyndra’s loan to put taxpayers behind a group of private investors to be repaid if the company went bankrupt."

What's a mere $1/2 billion among friends?

Don't ever let anyone tell you that money isn't energy, at least at the U.S. Department of Energy.
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4 comments:

  1. Hmmph. Maybe Congress ought to "restructure" the federal pensions of guys like this, so that their retirement funding only happens if there's any money left over after every other possible budget priority there is.

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  2. But, but, he is a scientist, everything he does is beyond question.

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  3. @Trestin - Fortunately or unfortunately, most specialists aren't any better informed about what goes on outside their specific fields than the rest of us.

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