The Solyndra investigation has brought loan guarantees out of the obscure world of political wonkery and into the living rooms of Americans around the country.

The problem is, many in the media are completely misrepresenting how the instrument works and who supports it.  So we’ve put together a video primer on how loan guarantees work, posted below.

Some Republicans may want you to believe they don’t support this Obama-era display of government largesse. But in fact, one of the loan guarantee programs for clean energy was signed into law by the Bush Administration. And what did the Bush folks have to say about it in 2007?

“The administration is one step closer to issuing guarantees for loans for clean energy projects that will help reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources, boost economic competitiveness, and combat climate change,” DOE spokeswoman Megan Barnett wrote in an e-mail.

If that statement were made by the Obama Administration today, conservative politicians would be all over the airwaves complaining about government manipulation of markets. The fact is, loan guarantees have historically enjoyed bipartisan support — until it wasn’t politically convenient to do so.

That includes Michigan Republican Fred Upton, chairman of the committee leading the investigation into the failed loan guarantee, who was an early backer of the policy. In 2007, he proposed adding $4 billion more to the loan guarantee program in order to help build new nuclear facilities around the country.

But speaking during a subcommittee hearing on Solyndra this week, Upton explained that he thinks they are “speculative”:

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JR:  The White House is still “very much committed” to greenhouse gas reductions the way NBC was “Committed to Keeping Conan O’Brien” on the network in January 2010.  Too harsh?  Just wait and see.

EPA seeks to quell climate concerns as greens fret

The Environmental Protection Agency sought to quell concerns Thursday that climate change regulations will face the same fate as an ozone rule that the White House scuttled this month.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said Wednesday that the agency would miss an end-of-September deadline to propose greenhouse gas standards for power plants, but insisted the rules are still on track.

She told San Francisco radio station KQED on Thursday that the agency will “absolutely” continue moving ahead with the standards. EPA officials say they will announce a new schedule shortly.

EPA is seeking to rebut the notion that the delay stems from White House or other influences outside the agency. Jackson told KQED that the delay was “not at all” a political decision, while spokeswoman Betsaida Alcantara told E2 that “we are very much committed to proposing the standards.”

I’d be slightly more reassured if they were committed to implementing the standards…..

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The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart is one of the most trenchant political satirists in the nation, cutting through not only hypocrisy but also disregard for reality. However, on climate and energy issues, Stewart has a spotty track record. On Dec. 1, 2009, the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart fell for the right-wing spin that cherry-picked phrases from hacked emails by climate scientists revealed a scandal:

Since then, repeated official investigations have proven what was evident from the start — that the scientists had been slandered, and were guilty of nothing more than sometimes saying mean things about critics.

Last night, Jon Stewart promoted the right-wing spin that cherry-picked phrases from subpoenaed emails by White House officials revealed a scandal:

Stewart didn’t even touch on what may be the only relevant part of the Solyndra bankruptcy, that corporate officials may have misrepresented their company’s health. But he did find it humorous that President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden said the company’s innovative technology represented the future of American jobs.

Did Rick Perry’s lies on global warming inadvertently trigger a backlash among voters?  Reuters and Stanford’s public opinion expert Jon Krosnick think so:

More Americans than last year believe the world is warming and the change is likely influenced by the Republican presidential debates, a Reuters/Ipsos poll said on Thursday.

The percentage of Americans who believe the Earth has been warming rose to 83 percent from 75 percent last year in the poll conducted Sept 8-12.

Certainly there has been a fair amount of media blowback from Perry’s disinformation, in part because fellow Republican Jon Huntsman took him on (see “Perry’s Climate Lies Win 4 Pinocchios“).

In our topsy-turvy world, Reuters and Krosnick argue the media coverage and backlash to the anti-science remarks of Rick Perry and other GOP presidential contenders has moved many Americans to reject those extremist views:

As Americans watch Republicans debate the issue, they are forced to mull over what they think about global warming, said Jon Krosnick, a political science professor at Stanford University….

“That is exactly the kind of situation that will provoke the public to think about the issue in a way that they haven’t before,” Krosnick said about news reports on the Republicans denying climate change science.

And you thought nothing good could come from the GOP rush to deny basic science.  Interestingly, the polling shows that the biggest movement toward understanding the Earth has been warming occurred among independents, a 9.5% rise in those who believe the Earth has been warming.

Of course, the fact that it has been so damn hot around the country with such staggering extreme weather may also be playing a role.  Still, the Atlantic‘s senior editor Derek Thompson makes a similar argument in his piece, “Rick Perry, Accidental Civics Teacher,” that “the media relies on his brand of hyperbole to have any sort of public policy debate.”

Krosnick goes on to argue that enough voters care very deeply about global warming that this could be a winning political issue for Obama — if the President chooses to take it on:

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by Jill Fitzsimmons, in a Media Matters cross-post

Conservative media outlets are trumpeting a front page story in today’s Washington Post which claims that “Obama’s efforts to create green jobs are lagging behind expectations.” But the article relies on questionable math regarding the jobs impact of the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program.

The Post wrote that the “$38.6 billion loan guarantee program” has directly created “3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount.” (DOE also estimates that the program has saved 33,000 jobs and added 7,391 temporary construction jobs) The article goes on to say that if DOE’s target of 60,000 jobs “is reached, it would work out to about $640,000 in loan guarantees for every job created or saved.”

But former White House economist Jared Bernstein called out the Post for its “bad math,” saying that “their emphasis on this $640K/job number assumes every loan defaults, which is implausible.”

Bernstein said that “the correct numerator” is not $38.6 billion, but the “credit subsidy” and “that’s likely to be well under $5 billion, which gets you into a much more reasonable neighborhood re bang-for-buck.” The “credit subsidy” is the amount of money set aside to cover “defaults and delinquencies, interest subsidies, or other payments” resulting from the loan guarantees. The stimulus provided $2.5 billion for the cost of the loan guarantees for renewable energy projects.

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While Republicans are keeping media attention on a $528 million federal loan to the bankrupt company Solyndra, they are working to make another $500 million in taxpayer money disappear without a trace. House Republicans have passed legislation to add $1 billion in funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) disaster relief fund, offset by cutting $1.5 billion from the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program at the Department of Energy.

A full half a billion dollars is lost in the transfer from the long-term loan program to the emergency relief fund.

Crippling the clean-car fund to pay for this year’s climate disasters compounds the stupidity of deliberately destroying $500 million of taxpayer funds.

“It is staggeringly shortsighted to pay for the economic losses of climate disasters by choking off funding for policies that reduce the threat of future climate disasters,” Bracken Hendricks, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told ThinkProgress Green when this bill was passed out of committee in May. “The Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program is helping US companies right now, to remain competitive and protect good manufacturing jobs, by producing highly efficient vehicles that cut dependence on foreign oil.”

Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) first proposed the plan.

NRG Energy’s W.A. Parish Electric Generating Station in Thompsons, Texas. Putting a price on carbon could generate revenues that we could use to lower the deficit, while creating jobs and stimulating new demand for American goods and services.

by Susan Lyon and Jorge Madrid

As Congress takes a hard look at deficit reduction, we should put all of our options on the table. A price on carbon is one of these options. It could raise upward of $846 billion over a 10-year period, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It’s no magic bullet for our nation’s deficit issues, but it is certainly a practical way to raise revenues while also creating jobs, fighting climate change, and saving programs for struggling communities. And you might not realize it today, but the policy does have support from across the political spectrum.

Here we examine how carbon pricing would work and why it’s a good proposal.

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