By Kindler
The man just can’t stop. Governor Glenn Youngkin is an Energizer Bunny powered by fossil fuels (or at least by their fatcat donors), on an endless quest to halt clean energy progress like some sort of Exxon-sponsored Terminator.
Every program, every project that dare divert a teaspoon of oil or gas from use in favor of renewable power must feel his wrath. In his blind loyalty to the fossil fuel industry, Youngkin will stoop to any level, including breaking the law (as he is doing in trying to illegally cancel Virginia’s legislatively enacted Clean Car Standard and membership in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). And like every Republican officeholder in the Age of Trump, he will lie shamelessly in defense of those whose products foul our air, water and land and ravage our climate.
His latest target? A solar power array planned for the Pentagon. But since it would look bad to scream “HEY, OIL AND GAS CEOS, PLEASE SEND CASH!”, he had to come up with another rationale for telling the Pentagon NOT to save taxpayer money and reduce its pollutant emissions.
So, of course, he went with Republicans’ favorite bogeyman – China! “This decision brings into question whether American taxpayer dollars will be used to purchase solar equipment from the Chinese Communist Party,” Youngkin sputtered. According to Richmond news station WRIC:
“Youngkin sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin saying the program the money comes from, created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law doesn’t have ‘any stated requirement that such panels be made in America using American technology.’”
That statement is so embarrassingly wrong. A teenage working in Youngkin’s office could’ve spent 5 minutes searching the Internet to find out that:
- President Biden has put a huge priority on bringing clean energy jobs home to the US, including signing an Executive Order his first week in office entitled “Ensuring the Future is Made in All of America by All of America’s Workers.”
- To implement that policy, Biden created a brand new program in the Office of Management and Budget called the Made in America Office.
- The Inflation Reduction Act codified Biden’s Executive Order into law with the Build America, Buy America Act, which covers not only direct procurement by Federal agencies but purchasing made by Federal contractors and grantees.
To its credit, WRIC noted these requirements in its story and asked Youngkin’s office about them. The lame response from his spokesperson was “Historically, federal agencies have waived the ‘Made in America’ requirements to procure solar panels, prioritizing purchasing cheap Chinese solar.”
And…wrong again! Exceptions meriting a waiver are pretty limited, and rather than keeping it a Deep State secret, Biden’s Made in America Office posts a record of all such waiver requests. You can look it yourself and see that, across the entire Federal government with its many hundreds of billions in spending, there are currently only 1218 waiver requests, and most of them are for bizarrely unique forms of equipment like NIH’s request for an Orbital Shaking Incubator. (Don’t ask.)
No, Papa Youngkin is not trying to protect us from the Big, Bad Yellow Menace. He is just working to shore up his ever-shrinking future prospects in GOP politics by attempting to stay in the good graces of the Koch Network and American Petroleum Institute.
The facts are that the project Youngkin is trying to kill will have “potential savings of over 7 million kWh of electricity and 128,157 MMBtu of natural gas per year, leading to an estimated annual total energy cost reduction of $1,357,864 and a significant greenhouse gas reduction of 8,861,845 kg-CO2.” And it is an investment that will ultimately NOT cost the taxpayers a dime, with a projected payback in 14 years – after which point, those solar panels provide permanently free and clean power, neither of which his beloved fossil fuels can ever provide.
Needless to say, Fox plastered Youngkin’s lies all over its outlets without fact checking a single comma – and then spread them throughout social media like a terrorist poisoning the water supply.
The lesson is clear – elect Republicans and you get public officials who answer to Big Oil, Gas and Coal, not to you. Democrats may not be perfect, but they are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy and creating many thousands of American jobs in the process. Please do your part to keep electing Democrats so that Republicans like Glenn Youngkin have no power to do anything more than whine, pout and stamp their feet.
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