Via Climate Progress: Are Your Solar Panels Breeding Bolsheviks? Tea Party Congress Targets National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL)

Posted: 06 Jun 2011 05:18 AM PDT

Peter Sinclair pens this guest post, his “Climate Denial Crock of the Week.”
UPDATE:   I have added a featured comment from Prof. Timothy Hughbanks of Texas A&M University in the text below.

The Tea Party congress hates new energy, hates the idea that the nation could be weaned off its oil dependence, or fossil fuels. They hate renewable energy because their primary sponsors in the fossil fuel industry want above all to slow progress on that front, and drag the nation back into the 19th century [see the CP post, "Video proof David Koch, the polluting billionaire, pulls the strings of the Tea Party extremists"].
We’ve seen a number of examples of this over recent months, now the anti-science crusade continues. Lead by Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO), 9 members of congress have now asked for the closure of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO.
The Denver Post reported this amazing story Saturday:

The lawmakers ask that funding in the 2012 budget be eliminated for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy programs because they “have failed to live up to their supposed potential.”
Democratic U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter, who represents the district in which the national lab is located, has said the facility generates 5,500 jobs.
“NREL is a crown jewel in the world of renewable energy,” said Les lie Oliver, a spokeswoman for Perlmutter. “It’s providing a lot of jobs; those are things we need to be fostering.”
According to an analysis by the University of Colorado, the lab provides a $714 million annual boost to the state’s economy.
The letter, written by California U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock IR-CA), says: “We should not follow the president’s poor planning in increasing the funding for these anti-energy boondoggles.”

By “boondoggle”, apparently he means wind energy, which has made up more than a third of new US capacity over the last several years, and is currently coming in competitive with, or cheaper than, coal in most areas of the country, or solar energy, which is now the fastest growing industry in the US.
Here American Wind Energy Association President Denise Bode kicks ass and takes names as Fox News “personalities” try to spread more disinformation about renewable energy:

Rep. Lanborn is following a script similar to Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who recently wrote that support for “so-called clean energy” is “not good for the United States.”

– Peter Sinclair.  This was first posted at his Climate Denial Crock of the Week.

[Joe Romm adds:   I was acting assistant secretary of energy  for energy efficiency and renewable energy in 1997,  overseeing NREL.  It is one of our great scientific and technological institutions, responsible for what leadership in clean energy technologies the United States still maintains.  Shutting it down would truly be cutting off our nose to spite our face.  Clean energy will be one of the biggest job creating industries of the next several decades as we simultaneously fight peak oil and human-cause global warming.  We need NREL now more than ever.]

FEATURED COMMENT from Timothy Hughbanks, Professor at Texas A&M University:

A proper reply to Charles Paine’s “extrapulation” concerning the Arizona solar project:  

“Mr. Paine, not only do you not know how to pronounce ‘extrapolate’, you apparently don’t what the word means. What your silly numbers demonstrate is your ability to stupidly perform ‘multiplication’, not ‘extrapolation’. A sensible ‘extrapolation’ would account for the cost trends over time, not roll the research and development costs into the current power generation yield to conclude that solar energy generation will always be expensive.”

Too bad the wind-power representative, Denise Bode, couldn’t have said that, before saying “…but I’m talking about wind power today.”