Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
into some complicated claim about how you'd have to cover all of New Jersey with
solar panels to produce the energy Exxon gas stations contain. “Do the math,” the oil
titan challenged. I found myself jumping up and yelling at the screen. It's completely
feasible to cover an area the size of New Jersey with solar panels! There's a lot of roof
space—plus parking lots, road sidings, and degraded land—in the United States, and it
adds up to a lot more than the area of the Garden State. New Jersey is actually quite
small, and with only that space we could replace the energy supply of a company that
holds the biggest share of the gas market. The truth is, a 1,000-square-mile area of solar
panels would provide all of our country's electricity needs, which is less than 10 percent
of the land used by the oil and gas industry today.
And then there are the outrageously sneaky lengths that CONG's soldiers will go to
get into our heads. Take haughty Lord Christopher Monckton—the British politician and
climatechangedenialist—whowascaughtontapeencouragingmembersoftheAustrali-
an mining industry to create a Fox News-style media network and use it to further the
mining agenda.
It's amazing how much fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) these people throw around
to make some of it stick—and to fool the world into thinking that clean energy isn't
ready for prime time. The best example of this is how Solyndra has been portrayed in
the media: When you compare the onslaught of coverage (fed by CONG's PR people)
surrounding the solar company's default on its $500 million government loan with the
relatively minuscule coverage of the revelation that US taxpayers had lost between $31
billion and $60 billion to waste and fraud by military contractors during the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, you know you're up FUD creek.
The congressionally commissioned report that exposed this outrageous waste of tax-
payer money was released the same week Solyndra shut down operations. It prompted
11 news articles and less than an hour of television coverage between August 28 and
September 23, 2011, even though the reported cost to taxpayers was at least 56 times
greater than that of the Solyndra failure. In the time between August 31 (the date Solyn-
dra suspended operations) and September 23, six major print outlets discussed the col-
lapse in 89 news and opinion items. Television networks discussed Solyndra for more
than 10 hours—eight of which occurred on Fox News alone. (That's a ratio of 10 to 1
on TV and almost 2 to 1 in print!) The media-watchdog group Media Matters, which
documented this disparity in coverage, reminded its readers that Congress had planned
for some failures with the Department of Energy loan guarantee program (which was ac-
tually set up before President Obama's time) because it was a portfolio of risky invest-
ments they were making to help launch some new energy companies, and they had set
aside $2.4 billion for the cost of defaults. Of more than 40 clean-energy companies that
