And you guys elected him. Another "green" company has failed Obama's social engineering scheme (how many does that make now). Ener1, which received $118.5 million of our taxpayer dollars to build batteries for electric vehicles, filed for bankruptcy today. Not only that, but they received the Obama kiss of death, he mentioned them in his campaign speec... SOTU address Tuesday:

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President Obama touted the program in his State of the Union address this year.

“In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries,” he said.

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And electric cars that catch fire, but I digress. Naturally, the administration defended the "investment" just as Obama defended the bailouts Tuesday - while saying “no bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts” out of the other side of his mouth.

What a dufus, and you guys elected him.

Heck of a job there Obama! What a track record with these green energy bucket list givaways !
This is the same company the VP Biden praised last year as a success.
Vice President Joe Biden to visit battery maker in Greenfield

As for the Volt made by Government Motors ,dealers are now refusing delivery .
Some Chevy dealers rejecting further Volt allocations

Maybe they should rename the car to Chevy Roman Candle ;or
Obamacar ,or Vehicular Flambe .

The President touted GM as a successful comeback story in SOTU address . But the word is that GM was forcing dealers to carry 90 days of inventory in order to make the units sold from the factory look good. Most dealers were complaining because they had to pay for 3 times more units sitting on the lot then they used to and it was really hurting their bottom line.
Widening GM Truck Supply Reminiscent of 2008 ?Bad Habits?: Cars - Bloomberg

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Originally Posted by tomder55

Maybe they should rename the car to Chevy Roman Candle ;or Obamacar ,or Vehicular Flambe .

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Priceless, tom.

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The President touted GM as a successful comeback story in SOTU address . But the word is that GM was forcing dealers to carry 90 days of inventory in order to make the units sold from the factory look good. Most dealers were complaining because they had to pay for 3 times more units sitting on the lot then they used to and it was really hurting their bottom line.
Widening GM Truck Supply Reminiscent of 2008 ?Bad Habits?: Cars - Bloomberg

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Everything Obama is an illusion, tom. How else does one congratulate himself on the job he did with the bailouts while slamming bailouts in the same speech?

Hello Curmudgeons...

If a country is going to INVEST in NEW technology that will SAVE the country, you're going to have a few disappointments... If you don't understand this, listen to Romney... He does. I think he's MENTIONED a few failures he's had along the way to his success.

excon

It is a joke .break even price on GM shares is $54.GM currently is at $24.72 a share.

The President in SOTU said that because of the bailout, GM is "back on top as the world's No. 1 automaker."

That is a clear distortion. Toyota took a big hit because of the phoney accelerator issue ,and the effects of the tsunami. But they are coming back rapidly . The truth is that GM and Chrysler are not competitive on the world market. I would not be holding shares in either .

The truth is that all the bailouts have been a disaster . AP reported that we will never recoup TARP despite the phoney claims that it was a net gain for the government.
Taxpayers owed $132.9 and may never get it back

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Originally Posted by excon

Hello Curmudgeons...

If a country is going to INVEST in NEW technology that will SAVE the country, you're gonna have a few disappointments... If you don't understand this, listen to Romney... He does. I think he's MENTIONED a few failures he's had along the way to his success.

excon

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Is there a success story yet ? Spain invested heavily in alt energy technology ;and the President has more than once said he's modelling his plan after Spains.

But a study of the green energy initiative in Spain ,sourced with EU data , reveals that for every 4 jobs created in the green energy marketplace ;9 are lost... and consumers are strapped with both higher taxes ,and higher rates per use of energy. Electricity rates “necessarily skyrocketed” in Spain, as did the public debt needed to underwrite the experiment .
http://www.juandemariana.org/pdf/090...-renewable.pdf
And even as Spain is taking steps to abandon it's failed experiment ,POTUS forges ahead despite the evidence.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

POTUS forges ahead despite the evidence.

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Hello again, tom:

When you're investing in NEW technology, evidence of past failures isn't germane. As an entrepreneur, do you know how many times I was told I couldn't do what I eventually DID?

What you curmudgeons fail to see, is that we have NO choice BUT to seek a new source of energy... In case nobody told you, the world WILL run out of oil. If WE don't do it, the Chinese will, and that won't be good for us.

excon

Maybe we will eventually run out .There are competing theories of that too.

And I have no doubt that technologies that natually evolve will one day replace carbon based sources. Back in the day ,the government did not take the shirt off the back of the taxpayer to invest in Edison's experiments . There was no urgency to replace whale oil lanterns .

But only after Edison ,an independent entrepreneur (without government funding),
Had success in developing a light bulb ,did the government invest in the infrastructure to bring electricity to the consumers.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

maybe we will eventually run out .There are competing theories of that too.

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Hello again, tom:

Certainly, if you believe that we have a never ending source of oil, you'd think investing in new sources of energy would be wasteful.

I, however, don't subscribe to that notion.

excon

I'm all for investing in new technologies. I'm against the federal government risking MY money, especially so a bunch of self-righteous liberals can pat themselves on the back for ruining my country.

If we were to run out in 5 years there are known proven alternative that would bridge the gap to that unknown future that the President would have us "invest "in. In the real world a marketable idea doesn't get forced fed to the consumer through command and control .

In fact subsidies hurts consumers(and yes I mean that for the subsidies that are given to all energy companies ) .

You want government research ? Fine I can live with that .But you can't create an industry that is not viable just because you want it to be so.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

You want government research ? Fine I can live with that .But you can't create an industry that is not viable just because you want it to be so.

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Hello again, tom:

Even if you want it to be so, you can't adjudge an industry to be "not viable" BEFORE you've invested in it,

excon

That is a fine position for the private investor to take if they choose. To invest taxpayers money on a pipe dream is irresponsible.

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Originally Posted by excon

Hello again, tom:

Even if you want it to be so, you can't adjudge an industry to be "not viable" BEFORE you've invested in it,

excon

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Failed Obama investments in "green" companies so far:

Beacon Power
A123 Systems
GlobalWatt
Evergreen Solar
SpectraWatt
Solyndra
Ener1

Any more?

Betting taxpayer dollars is not just wrong, it's damn wrong.

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Is the battery going to supplant or replace the internal combustion engine? That's never going to happen: not in my lifetime, my children's lifetime or my children's children's lifetime

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What Do We Need From the Battery of the Future? By David Biello | Txchnologist
(Jeffrey Chamberlain... the lead scientist of the 'Energy Storage Initiative' at the Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory .)

Hello again, tom:

I read the article.. I SEE that current technology ain't going to do it for us.

Good thing for us, though, that the guy who invented the wheel didn't STOP when he faced those same hurdles.

excon

What government paid for his research ?
We don't disagree with invention and discovery. You seem to think that it is our responsiblilty to subsidize it. It's a Joe Biden Elizabeth Warren falacy that I'm surprised you fall for .

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Originally Posted by tomder55

what government paid for his research ?

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Hello again, tom:

There are myriad ways in which our government subsidizes scientific research. It runs the gambit from research undertaken by STATE owned universities to government owned facilities, direct investment in business, or the granting of tax credits and deductions.

I favor ALL of them. I ALSO liked the space program. What?? You didn't?

excon

The space race was a contest between command and control governance and a free enterprise system .The free enterprise system won. The technology to do it was known and largely proven to be doable long before Kennedy pressed the issue.

Yes we paid for it ,as great frontier nations should .Perhaps the message from that time is to keep your fiscal house in order if you want to be a great nation. I wonder how many libs back then said what I hear them frequently ask today... why are we in space when there are more pressing things to do on earth ?

I hate to break it to you ,but the biggest innovations in space travel for many years now has come from the private sector . Last I heard ,the President correctly knocked down the ridiculous big fire cracker called 'Constellation ' that the government was promoting .

That's because the future technology to pursue a space program will come from the private sector;just like it has in the past.

Now ,if our fiscal house was in order ;and there was an urgency to it ,then of course I would favor more investment in space ;just like I would've favored the Louisiana purchase in 1800s .

You mentioned the Chinese overtaking us in energy innovation ;and I guess Newt is arguing that we should colonize the moon lest we lose that edge too.
My counter-argument to both points is that if the Chinese advance in either it will be technology they stole . Their command and control system invented nothing .If they were developing their projects with their own, it would come crashing back to earth just like the Russian Phobos probe.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

My counter-argument to both points is that if the Chinese advance in either it will be technology they stole . Their command and control system invented nothing .If they were developing their projects with their own, it would come crashing back to earth just like the Russian Phobos probe.

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How disengenuous of you Tom. Do you thing the only innovation comes from the US? The US is far more likely to have stolen the technology than the Chinese. If they stole it their space program should have caught up with yours by now and we would see Chinese on the Moon or on their way to Mars. No, the malaise in the US space program is they have no competitors to steal from, no German scientists to contribute ideas, I doubt there has been an original thought in 60 years. Go build another space capsule

Yeah I take it back... the Clintoons sold some of it to the Chinese for campaign contributions.

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Originally Posted by speechlesstx

And you guys elected him. Another "green" company has failed Obama's social engineering scheme (how many does that make now). Ener1, which received $118.5 million of our taxpayer dollars to build batteries for electric vehicles, filed for bankruptcy today. Not only that, but they received the Obama kiss of death, he mentioned them in his campaign speec...SOTU address Tuesday:

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Small change really compared to the early 80's when over 2 billion dollars was wasted on building a supercollider in Texas. The project was eventually abandoned at a cost of over 2.2 billion dollars. All you got for the money was a large circular hole in the ground.

Tut

And yet another one is on the skids .

Amonix, Inc. a manufacturer of solar panels that received $5.9 million from the bucket list , will cut two-thirds of its workforce, about 200 employees, only seven months after opening a factory in Nevada.

If we were going to "Invest" in green energy the payout should only be in the form of a prize for demonstrated success. We could model it after Ansari X Prize which awarded a private firm $10 million if they are the 1st to successfully launch a reusable manned space craft twice in one week. The Tier One project won it with SpaceShipOne.

In other words ;show us some results before the government invests . What a concept ! Government spending that rewards results .

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Originally Posted by tomder55

In other words ;show us some results before the government invests . What a concept ! Government spending that rewards results .

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Hello again, tom:

Hmmmm... I LIKE the concept... I even suggested it in relation to the Bush tax cuts... You guys kept saying raising taxes on the job creators ISN'T a good idea... So, I suggested that we give them a tax credit AFTER they created a few jobs...

All I heard was silence...

excon

I only offered that up as an alternative to subsidizing business. However ,I'd prefer none.

The only tax idea I'm in favor of is flat or tiered rates with many fewer deductions ,credits etc.

Reagan flattened the tax rates ,and in his 3rd year of his Presidency ,during a recovery period ,the growth was at 6% +.

Now you know the President talks out of both sides of his mouth about energy . He and his cronies have done everything they can to impede the tremendous growth of the natural gas industrty .Yet in the SOTU address ,he brazenly took credit for the success of the industry.

It's too bad he doesn't take a more active role in reducing the impediments to business like calling off the EPA dogs .He is on the wrong course .

It's bad for the country. Forcing the cost of traditional energy sources up through government manipulations will not create that market for alternatives he desires.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

It's too bad he doesn't take a more active role in reducing the impediments to business like calling off the EPA dogs .He is on the wrong course .

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Hello again, tom:

I don't know... Of course, YOU personally wouldn't throw your trash into the air, as you've said here many times... But, it looks like you'd be OK if industry did it. Somehow, I knew that.

Don't you think smoke stack scrubbers are a GOOD thing?

excon

I have read through all this and I am just amazed at how our government can't seem to get it right. Nor can others that have already posted. The edison lightbulb was a failure. It lost out to the one created by Tesla. Another thing is that when bringing in new technology there has to be standards. And with the standards can come government intervention in the form of investment. Later after things are already going then there may be changes. Look at it this way. If we didn't have roads then there wouldn't be any cars. Roads set the standards for the sizes of loads that could be carried and the routes that could be taken when traveling.

Electric cars are no different. There needs to be a standard set for the infrastructure for the industry to advance. When building or rebuilding roads there are ways to make it more friendly to the electric car. One such possibility would be solar powered magnets placed beneath the roadway. Another would be simaler to the technology currently being used for charging batteries without a hardwire connection. Electric motors operate in a nuetral zone. When power and comsumption are equal then you can begin to charge the battery. By the very virtue of driving down the highway you could have a car running at a steady speed charging the battery as it goes thereby increasing the range beyond where it is today to possibly infinite. It can be done. Its just a matter of directing things in such a way as to funnel the technology to a given outcome.

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Originally Posted by califdadof3

If we didn't have roads then there wouldn't be any cars. Roads set the standards for the sizes of loads that could be carried and the routes that could be taken when traveling.

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Dad this is a false premise, cars were a natural extension of the development of engines, and once we had engines we developed a means whereby they could be used to haul loads and propel the vehicles we had already invented. Roads had already existed for eons, even if they were only tracks and wheel ruts.

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Electric cars are no different. There needs to be a standard set for the infrastructure for the industry to advance. When building or rebuilding roads there are ways to make it more friendly to the electric car. One such possibility would be solar powered magnets placed beneath the roadway. Another would be simaler to the technology currently being used for charging batteries without a hardwire connection. Electric motors operate in a nuetral zone. When power and comsumption are equal then you can begin to charge the battery. By the very virtue of driving down the highway you could have a car running at a steady speed charging the battery as it goes thereby increasing the range beyond where it is today to possibly infinite. It can be done. Its just a matter of directing things in such a way as to funnel the technology to a given outcome.

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Another false premise, the vehicle needs to conform to the available inferstructure, not the other way around. We already have magnetic levitation but it is too expensive to use for personal transport. We can use existing technology to charge batteries, a small motor is sufficient to charge a battery and extend the range of an electric vehicle since most journeys are not long distance. It doesn't need elaborate inferstructure. What needs to change is our thinking, at the moment we have an idea that our vehicle must be all purpose, whereas we could have have electric vehicles for our everyday short trips and hire more suitable vehicles for the occasional long trips. Many people own vehicles that might be used for their designed purpose only once a year

Just to throw in my two cents - I'm NOT "one of the guys" who elected him.

Tesla ,Edison... did either of them get government funding during their research phase ? I don't believe so.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

Tesla ,Edison... did either of them get government funding during their reasearch phase ? I don't believe so.

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I believe Tesla did for the implimentation of a few projects including the worlds fair which was the first to feature his lightbulb. Also for generators as part of daming projects (hydro electric) Tesla was way ahead of the others in his brilliant thinking.

That's what I thought too ,although I believe Tesla was largely financed by those dreaded investment bankers.

My point was that the discovery was not based on some government theorician's image of what energy of the future would be . The government did not begin the infrastructure work until it was a proven.

At the moment we are only looking at one side of the equation. Science and technology for a profit doesn't represent the total of human knowledge. It hasn't and I certainly hope it doesn't in the future.

Governments of all persuasions make 'knowledge investments' that don't have tangible outcomes other than just knowing.

The Hubble Space Telescope is an example of government investment that private industry would not have any any reason to pursue. There are no economic benefits in knowing the universe is so may billion miles across.

The Reagan administration (to their credit) was prepared to spend up to 4 billion dollars to build a supercollider just so scientists could smash atoms together hoping to find out why particles have mass. No real economic, social or military advantage there. There was of course a political advantage and this is probably why the project fell down in the end. Over 2 billion dollars wasted and not one atom smashed. No doubt there were a lot of Democrats 'up in arms' over the whole thing.

Sure millions of dollars have been lost in green technologies. But we need to keep in mind this is what governments of all persuasions have done. It doesn't make it right, but it is what they do.

Tut

Governments give incentives for research, If you don't like this vote for someoneelse. I know all this green research is ridiculous at the moment, pursuing a pipe dream, but this is what politicians do. If we knew the answers we wouldn't need to do research. Perhaps the investment will lead somewhere

Tut, I think we've all agreed that funding of research - responsibly spent I would add, not squandered on shrimp on a treadmill - is reasonable.

The government betting my taxpayer dollars on risky "investments" to force an agenda, benefit cronies and determine winners and losers in the market is another story altogether.

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Originally Posted by speechlesstx

Tut, I think we've all agreed that funding of research - responsibly spent I would add, not squandered on shrimp on a treadmill - is reasonable.

The government betting my taxpayer dollars on risky "investments" to force an agenda, benefit cronies and determine winners and losers in the market is another story altogether.

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Hi speech,

What is regarded as responsible and irresponsible is hard to determine. It can also depend on your political perspective.

Reagan pushing hard for a scientific project was an example of forcing an agenda.

Deciding to transfer the project to Texas? Well, you can look at the history to determine who was to benefit.

Winners and losers in the Market place? We don't live in a perfect freemarket economy. Government intervention in some form will always determine winners and losers to some extent. Trying to influence the marketplace to go green doesn't represent the marketplace in total.

The supercollider was a pipe-dream. By that I mean it is possible to build one and in fact it was eventually built in Europe. It was a pipe-dream because it was never going to be built by just one country at the time.

Billions of taxpayer dollars were invested in a project that had political strings attached and therefore was doomed from the start.

I don't really see that this is another story altogether.

Tut

Texas has the space.

Perhaps there should be an international effort to tilt at windmills . Spain's efforts are failures ;T Boone polluting the Texas landscape with windmills is a no go.

Finding the elusive Higgs boson particle (if there is such a thing) is closer to reality than Obama's perpetual motion machine.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

Texas has the space.

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It also had the right political connections at the time.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

Perhaps there should be an international effort to tilt at windmills . Spain's efforts are failures ;T Boone polluting the Texas landscape with windmills is a no go.

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I don't know much about Spain.Tell me what's happening in Spain.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by tomder55

Finding the elusive Higgs boson particle (if there is such a thing) is closer to reality than Obama's perpetual motion machine.

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Both are turning out very expensive for no result. If you had a choice which one to terminate your decision would be largely political. Would it not?

All I am saying is that both parties do exactly the same thing when they are in power. It seems to be universal in politics.

Tut

I will not be put in the position to defend the Repubics when they do the indefensible.

BTW ;the political connection back then was Texas Democrat Speaker of the House Jim Wright. The Democrats also controlled both houses of Congress throughout Reagan's terms .

The whole project was mired in mismanagement and cost over-runs. In that regard it is very similar to the Obama green initiative. The Project on Government Oversight concluded that it would continue to be mired in mismanagement and ever increasing costs.

The US had to make a choice about where it's research money went. We opted to fund the ISS . I think it was the right move.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

I will not be put in the position to defend the Repubics when they do the indefensible.

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I am not disagreeing with you for the sake of disagreement.

Reagan was a driving force behind the idea and I think he was on the right track. I think it was a good idea then and I still think it is a good idea. I also think it was unfortunate the way it ended. It was also unfortunate that it turned out to be a very expensive lesson.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

BTW ;the political connection back then was Texas Democrat Speaker of the House Jim Wright. The Democrats also controlled both houses of Congress throughout Reagan's terms .

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George Bush snr was the incoming president so there was some speculation at the time it was a political decision to relocate.But I am happy to go along with what you are saying.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

The whole project was mired in mismanagement and cost over-runs. In that regard it is very simular to the Obama green initiative. The Project on Government Oversight concluded that it would continue to be mired in mismanagement and ever increasing costs.

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Yes, apparently the cost blew out to something incredible like 12-14 billion dollars.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

The US had to make a choice about where it's research money went. We opted to fund the ISS . I think it was the right move.

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It was the Clinton administration that eventually put the project out of its misery. No choice really. Yes, the ISS was the right move.

Tut