October 3-4, 2012: Fact Checkers Show Romney Misstated Crucial Data about Obama Administration’s Clean Energy Investments

Analyses by the New York Times and FactCheck.org show that presidential candidate Mitt Romney made some fundamental misstatements when he criticized the Obama administration’s green energy program (see February 2009). During the October 3 presidential debate, Romney claimed Obama had given $90 billion of federal money to clean energy programs, saying at one point: “Now, I like green energy as well, but that’s about 50 years’ worth of what oil and gas receives. Ninety billion—that—that would have—that would have hired two million teachers.” The Times reports that while the $90 billion is an accurate number drawn from the 2009 economic stimulus package, not all of it was spent on green energy, and much of the money that was spent on green energy programs was authorized during the Bush administration. Of the $90 billion authorized by the Obama administration, $29 billion went to energy efficiency programs; much of that was spent on retrofitting homes and apartments of low-income households to be more energy efficient and lower their energy costs. $18 billion was spent on fast, energy-efficient trains and $21 billion was spent on wind farms, solar panels, and other renewable energy. Much of these expenditures was matched by private investments. Romney claimed, “I think about half of them, of the ones have been invested in, they’ve gone out of business,” and cited the example of Solyndra, a maker of solar equipment that went bankrupt, costing the government some $528 million. The Times notes that Solyndra began receiving money during the Bush administration, and that the government has been able to recover some of its funds from other firms that went bankrupt. The Times writes, “The defaults were far less than Congress had allocated to cover losses, and far, far less than half of the ventures, although some others may yet fail.” FactCheck, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, goes further, noting, “In summary, Romney said a lot about the $90 billion in stimulus spending on clean energy—and very little of it was accurate.” FactCheck accuses Romney of making “numerous bogus claims” about the $90 billion energy funding. Only six percent of the firms loaned money by the government for clean energy technology have gone bankrupt, it notes, not “about half,” as Romney claimed. Romney also wrongly stated that the entire $90 billion was spent on “solar and wind” projects; in reality, less than a third was spent on those programs. His claim that the $90 billion was equivalent to “about 50 years’ worth of what oil and gas receives” in tax breaks was doubly wrong; by his own figures, it would have been 32 years’ worth, but real data shows it is closer to about 10 years’ worth of oil and gas subsidies. The claim that Obama could “have hired two million teachers” was wrong, since much of that $90 billion was in the form of loans, and, FactCheck notes, “the government can’t hire teachers with loans.” Even data provided by the Romney campaign to back up its claims disproves Romney’s assertions. [New York Times, 10/4/2012; FactCheck (.org), 10/4/2012]