Obama's Legacy: A Long List of Unsuccessful Green initiatives

From the beginning of his presidency, Obama has warned the public about the detrimental effect of climate change. He has constantly preached that the nation has to take action to leave less of a carbon footprint on the planet.

As the president’s time in office comes to an end, what has he done to improve the environment?

Well, it’s safe to say that he has wasted millions of taxpayers dollars by funding solar and wind energy focused companies that have gone bankrupt. 

For example, Abound Solar received over $400 million, but had to laid off almost half of its company in 2012 before going bankrupt. Solyndra was also one of the many eco-friendly companies given millions, specifically $535 million before the company filed for bankruptcy in 2011.

In December of last year, the Department of Energy (DOE) was caught red-handed in a cover up. The Daily Caller News Foundation requested records citing the Freedom of Information Act of the biofuels company, Abengoa. 

This was following the speculation that the company was experiencing major financial issues, even though it received a $137 million loan and $97 million grant from the federal government. But earlier in 2015, operations had halted after only a year. The company was $2.3 billion in debt and taxpayers were left to recover the debt.

“To put this in perspective, the Abengoa bankruptcy exposes taxpayers to losses four times greater than Solyndra, making it the largest failure of the DOE green loan program to date,’ said Mike Pompeo, Kansas republican representative in a letter to the DOE. 

The DOE claimed that they redacted the documents to protect personal information in the letters, but some pages were never made available. This just proved that the government was trying to hide something.

Even more recently, the “green” president wasted $2.2 billion of the nation’s money with another solar power initiative. The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System announced in March that it was not producing enough electricity for PG&E Corp and that it “may be forced to shut down if it doesn’t receive a considerable break this month from state regulators.” 

Then in late May, the solar energy plant caught on fire after the mirrors used to reflect sunlight were somehow directed to the plant’s boiler towers. Following the fire, the plant is only able to generate electricity from one of its three towers. 

Although, this company’s mission is to provide a clean energy source that has a “low environmental impact design,” the project has actually caused an uproar with environmentalists for killing thousands of local birds, while not even producing the amount of energy promised. 

These funding mistakes by Obama’s DOE has cost the country billions, even more than the disastrous, and unbelievably expensive Obamacare system. 

And it’s only going to get worse for taxpayers if Clinton gets elected. The Democratic candidate plans to increase solar capacity by 700%, which means hundreds of billions of taxpayers money will be robbed to do so. The problem with solar technologies is that they are extremely expensive to install, so major funds will be needed up front. 

“Assuming solar remains at $114.3 $/MWh and the subsidies continue, the cost of a 140 GW goal could reach $246 billion. On an annual basis, this is approximately $67 billion,” cites the American Action Forum in a recent report. 

According to these figures, Clinton’s solar plan will rack up $250 billion by 2020.