Obama’s $529 Green Loan to Finnish Company That Made $100,000 Cars Is Linked to Al Gore

The Obama Administration gave $529 million in loans to a car company in Finland that made $100,000 lemons.

Now the company is in financial trouble and the cars are burning down garages. Oh… And the green company is linked to Al Gore.

Fisker Karma – Another Green Lemon

In 2009 the Obama Administration gave a $529 million U.S. government loan to help build a hybrid sports car in Finland. The company was promoted by Al Gore.
The Wall Street Journal reported on this curious investment:

A tiny car company backed by former Vice President Al Gore has just gotten a $529 million U.S. government loan to help build a hybrid sports car in Finland that will sell for about $89,000.

The award this week to California startup Fisker Automotive Inc. follows a $465 million government loan to Tesla Motors Inc., purveyors of a $109,000 British-built electric Roadster. Tesla is a California startup focusing on all-electric vehicles, with a number of celebrity endorsements that is backed by investors that have contributed to Democratic campaigns.

The awards to Fisker and Tesla have prompted concern from companies that have had their bids for loans rejected, and criticism from groups that question why vehicles aimed at the wealthiest customers are getting loans subsidized by taxpayers.

“This is not for average Americans,” said Leslie Paige, a spokeswoman for Citizens Against Government Waste, an anti-tax group in Washington. “This is for people to put something in their driveway that is a conversation piece. It’s status symbol thing.”

DOE officials spent months working with Fisker on its application, touring its Irvine, Calif., and Pontiac, Mich., facilities and test-driving prototypes.

Matt Rogers, who oversees the department’s loan programs as a senior adviser to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, said Fisker was awarded the loan after a “detailed technical review” that concluded the company could eventually deliver a highly fuel-efficient hybrid car to a mass audience.

Now the company is in financial trouble and the cars are burning down garages.
The Daily Caller reported:

Fisker Automotive isn’t the next Solyndra — it’s worse.

Nearly $200 million into a $529 million loan from the Department of Energy, Fisker’s yet to build a car in the United States. The current model they offer, the Karma, retails for a reasonable $103,000. And here’s the fun part. The Karma, produced in Finland, first suffered a recall in December. That recall expanded recently — in no small part due to a Karma in Texas lighting on fire and burning down the garage where it was parked. It appears that not only are these not American cars, but they’re not even particularly safe for American drivers. But don’t fret.

It was only a cool $200 million down the drain.

And, of course, no one will ever be held accountable for this green scandal. And liberals are laughing all the way to the bank.

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What happened to the global warming craze?

Source

Global Warming — RIP. Por Victor Davis Hanson.

Corruption within the climate-change industry explains some of the sudden turnoff. “Climategate” — the unauthorized 2009 release of private emails from the Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom — revealed that many of the world’s top climate scientists were knee-deep in manipulating scientific evidence to support preconceived conclusions and personal agendas.

Shrill warnings about everything from melting Himalayan glaciers to shrinking polar bear populations turned out not always to be supported by scientific facts.

Unfortunately, “green” during the last three years has also become synonymous with Solyndra-style crony capitalism. Common-sense ideas like more windmills, solar panels, retrofitted houses and electric cars have all been in the news lately.

But the common themes were depressingly similar: few jobs created and little competitively priced energy produced, but plenty of political donors who landed hundreds of millions of dollars in low-interest loans from the government.

Of course, it didn’t help that the world’s most prominent green spokesman, Nobel laureate Al Gore, made tens of millions of dollars from his own advocacy. And he adopted a lifestyle of jet travel and energy-hungry homes at odds with his pleas for everyone else to cut back.

(…)

Then, when “climate change” was not still enough to frighten the public into action, yet a third term followed: “climate chaos.” Suddenly some “green experts” claimed that even more terrifying disasters — from periodic hurricanes and tornadoes to volcanoes and earthquakes — could for the first time be attributed to the burning of fossil fuels. At that point, serially changing the name of the problem suggested to many that there might not be such a problem after all.

(…)

We simply don’t know positively whether recent human activity has caused the planet to warm up to dangerous levels. But we do know that those who insist it does are sometimes disingenuous, often profit-minded, and nearly always impractical.

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