In a “prebuttal” to President Obama’s State of the Union address, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and private-equity millionaire, laid out an understanding of American energy policy that bears only a tenuous relationship to reality. Romney attacked successful government investment in clean energy as failures, falsified the recent history of domestic oil and gas development, and wrote the Deepwater Horizon disaster out of memory. Like the rest of the Republican Party, Romney made sure to jump on the Keystone XL pipeline bandwagon, purporting it would create tens of thousands of jobs.

Romney, who as recently as last June told New Hampshire voters that it’s “important” to reduce greenhouse pollution, talked only of a future where oil and gas drilling faces no regulatory hurdles.

Below, ThinkProgress Green provides Romney’s speech with the facts it was lacking.

Energy Facts: Rebutting Romney’s Prebuttal

ROMNEY: When we needed stability and solvency, he gave us Solyndra.

FACT CHECK: Solyndra, an innovative solar panel manufacturer, was a private-investment darling to the tune of $961 million until silicon prices plummeted, making their technology too expensive for the marketplace. Bloomberg has found that the default rate, including the $535 million Solyndra default, on the $16.1 billion Energy Department loan portfolio is less than 3.6 percent. The Department of Energy has leveraged taxpayer dollars into nearly $40 billion in solvent projects, helping create 60,000 stable American clean-economy jobs.

ROMNEY: When we needed a climate for private investment, he gave us Cash for Clunkers.

FACT CHECK: The Cash for Clunkers program was “huge success,” Forbes declared. Before the $3 billion program was enacted, 1500 car dealerships had closed, laying off 50,000 people. Cash for Clunkers simultaneously provided a critical lifeline to the American auto manufacturers and car dealers at a crucial moment in the economy, spurred a major increase in the fuel economy of new car purchases, and made efficiency a major selling point in the minds of the American consumer. Cash for Clunkers provided consumers about one-sixth the price of the new cars, meaning it directly spurred about $15 billion in private spending.

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The Koch-funded political advocacy organization Americans for Prosperity is unleashing another multi-million campaign to play up the Solyndra bankruptcy in key election states.

After the release of 180,000 pages of documents and months of a heavily-politicized Congressional investigation that included testimony from Energy Secretary Steven Chu, there is still no evidence that the loan guarantee issued to the now-bankrupt solar company Solyndra was a political favor, or that any official in the Administration did anything illegal.

In fact, an in-depth investigation of the Solyndra documents conducted by the Washington Post recently found: “The [email] records do not establish that anyone pressured the Energy Department to approve the Solyndra loan to benefit political contributors.”

But rather than stick to the known facts established by an ongoing investigation, AFP seems to believe it has greater insight into the issue than Congress, investigative journalists or the FBI — spending $6 million to spread lies and half truths about the Solyndra affair.

The ad is part of a desperate full-court press by conservatives to keep Solyndra at the top of the headlines:

This $6 million campaign follows a $2.4 million media blitz on Solyndra by Americans for Prosperity last fall. That ad was labeled “mostly false” by the fact-checking organization PolitiFact. But facts be damned, the Solyndra issue will continue to be a central piece of the GOP’s political agenda this year.

Typical of smear ads, this latest Solyndra spot is very “creative” with the truth.

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Republican presidential front runner Mitt Romney is catching a lot of flak for his comment in New Hampshire yesterday that he “likes to fire people” who provide him services he doesn’t think adequate.

While everyone was busy interpreting the meaning of that comment, Romney made a more decidedly firm — and bizarrely false — statement about solar investment. While the solar industry saw a record amount of installations and investment in 2011, bringing in more venture capital dollars ($1.81 billion) than any other cleantech sector, Romney claimed that investors “pulled back in that industry” after the Solyndra debacle:

He compared the way Bain Capital helped start Staples, a company that acted lean for its first years and received just $5 million of capital investment, with the way Solyndra acted after receiving $530 million from Washington, getting fancy corporate offices.

“When people saw what Staples was doing, they got into the same market too. But when other solar companies saw Solyndra get $530 million from the government, investors pulled back in that industry,” he said. “So instead of encouraging solar development, the Obama administration hurt it.”

Actually, the exact opposite happened — U.S. solar installations more than doubled in 2011, with last year seeing a $1 billion investment from Bank of America for the single largest residential solar project ever.

If Romney were being graded on the PolitiFact scale Truth-O-Meter scale, the Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire meter would be completely off the charts.

At this point, with the Solyndra debacle fading out of the headlines, why pay attention to a ridiculous statement like this at one at a campaign stop in New Hampshire? Because this was at a meeting with 300 members of Nashua, New Hampshire’s Chamber of Commerce — a group of people who have enormous influence over the business decisions of the state’s second-largest city.

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Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was once a venture capitalist. So when he became governor of Massachusetts, he recognized the need to set up a Green Energy Fund (!) in his state to “to provide equity capital, loans and management assistance to Massachusetts-based renewable energy businesses.”

Today, with continued state-level support, Massachusetts is a leader in cleantech venture capital — competing with Silicon Valley in biotech, renewable energy, and efficiency investments.

But now, in his bid to join the Solyndra scare-mongers in the GOP fringe, Romney is claiming the federal loan guarantee program that helped leverage tens of billions in private capital will cause investments to “disappear.” In an interview with Charlie Rose earlier this week, Romney said the program “kills solar energy.”

When the president says, “I’m going to … put a half-billion dollars into my favorite solar energy company, Solyndra,” let’s pretend for a moment that it didn’t go bankrupt. Let’s just pretend it was successful. Here’s what he doesn’t understand. There are well over 100 different businesses, I’ll bet, in this country that are trying to develop new solar technology. When he picks one that the government gets behind with $500 million, the investments in all the others disappear, because no one wants to compete with the government.

He kills solar energy by having the government play the role of venture capitalist. You either believe in free enterprise and freedom and the American system or you believe in the European government-dominated system, and that system is a failed system.

That must be why, in spite of the loan guarantee program that helped many “first-of-a-kind” solar projects get off the ground, General Electric is building a 400-MW thin film solar manufacturing facility in Colorado on its own. Or why companies like Google are throwing tens of millions of dollars behind solar projects throughout the U.S., helping accelerate the solar market into another record year.

Yep. That loan guarantee program sure did kill solar investments.

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Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS has the latest ad that piles on with Solyndra smears, seeking to scapegoat clean energy investment for political points. The Crossroads ad “Typical,” released in a national buy, attacks Solyndra — a company once backed by private investors of all political stripes and the Bush administration — as an opportunity for the Obama administration to supply handouts to donors:

Rove’s ad follows a similar one from the Koch brothers, part of a disturbing trend of fossil-driven politics that attacks not only environmental protection but even clean energy business.

Contrary to the ad’s fear-mongering tone and surrounding media witch hunt, the consequences of Solyndra’s bankruptcy have been completely distorted. A recent Bloomberg Government report found Solyndra’s loan constitutes less than one percent of all federal loan guarantees, concluding “the focus on Solyndra is not proportional to its impact.” If conservatives’ witch-hunt cut off federal commitment to renewable energy, it may “jeopardize the remaining projects under review, calling into question the potential of new-to-market energy projects” for renewable energy. Bloomberg reports that ending investment in renewables would generate no budget savings, but it would cause great harm to the industry.

It’s getting a bit hard to keep track of Gov. Rick Perry’s “oops” moments on the campaign trail. In the last week alone, he’s fumbled the name of a Supreme Court justice, the number of judges on the court, and the age of eligibility to run for president (just as he didn’t know the voting age).

Perry has tumbled so low in the polls his comic displays of ignorance are beginning to avoid notice, but he made another doozy in Iowa yesterday, CNN reports:

While criticizing President Barack Obama for picking winners and losers in the energy industry, he bungled the name of the most famous energy company to go under despite government assistance.

“No greater example of it than this administration sending millions of dollars into the solar industry, and we lost that money,” Perry began. “I want to say it was over $500 million that went to the country Solynda.”

Perry not only confused Solyndra with a country, he got the name of the company wrong, calling it “Solynda.”

As ThinkProgress Green has been reporting, the Solyndra story is a manufactured scandal Republicans have kept alive to try to smear the Obama administration.

Subscribe to ThinkProgress Green.

CNN reports on Rick Perry campaigning in Iowa:

“I’m for pulling all of those tax credits, or subsidies or however you refer to them out of the energy industry,” Perry said….

But his attempt to turn this tough talk into an attack on the current administration came with a few of the verbal misstatements that have plagued other public appearances by Perry. While criticizing President Barack Obama for picking winners and losers in the energy industry, he bungled the name of the most famous energy company to go under despite government assistance.

“No greater example of it than this administration sending millions of dollars into the solar industry, and we lost that money,” Perry began. “I want to say it was over $500 million that went to the country Solynda.”

Darn you Obama for making three mistakes — losing all that money, funneling it to an imaginary foreign country … and I forgot the third….

by Shauna Theel, in a Media Matters cross-post

by Jocelyn Fong, cross-posted from Media Matters

On the day after Thanksgiving, Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton called on readers to “give thanks” for Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Joe Stephens, who have been “dogging the trail of Solyndra.” Pexton said their reporting on Solyndra showed that the Post produces journalism that is “hard-hitting regardless of who is in power.”

Leonnig and Stephens have certainly provided the play-by-play of the political battle over Solyndra’s failure. As Pexton notes, much of their reporting relied on the Republican-led investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, with each strategically-timed document release and hearing garnering a Post article or two.

Pexton didn’t analyze the Post’s coverage in detail or with a critical eye, so here are some of my own observations:

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