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October 18, 201

Obamas Big Green MessFromNewsweek/Daily Beast

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By Daniel Stone and Eleanor CliftOctober 17, 2011

This summer, federal inspectors made a routine visit to 11 homes in St. Louis to see what taxpayers got forthe $5 billion that President Obama spent to help Americans weatherize their homes to save energy.

What they found was quite a surprise. Some of the energy-efficient furnaces installed at taxpayer expensespewed carbon monoxide that could poison occupants. New water heaters lacked required pressure valvesputting them in jeopardy of exploding. And a handful of contractorsunfamiliar with the nuances ofspecialized weatherization workhad used air blowers in homes with asbestos, potentially dispersing thecancer-causing agent, according to several Energy Department inspector-general reports.

As it closes in on retrofitting 600,000 homes, the governments weatherization programa key element ofPresident Obamas green-energy initiativehas had its share of happy, energy-saving customers. But it has

also been riddled with problems. In one review, Energy Department investigators found that 14 percent ofweatherization projects surveyed, from Tennessee to West Virginia, failed to meet safety or qualitystandards. Many customers were poor or elderly, with few resources to pursue wayward contractors.

It turned out that as so much money was being spent so quickly, a lot of state and local governments, as weas contractors, simply werent ready for the job at hand. "You dont have trained people to do those jobs inplaces like Arizona or Florida," says Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Board and Obamas handpickewatchdog to oversee stimulus spending. "It turned into a cottage industry." A senior Energy Departmentofficial agreed: "We were clearly not ready to take all this money, especially at the state level."

Washingtons scandal du jour has been Solyndra. The California solar company received a rushed half-billion-dollar clean-energy stimulus loan from the Obama administration, only to go bankrupt andpotentially leave taxpayers on the hookdespite warnings from career officials that both Solyndra and thelarger solar industry were facing financial pressures.

But it is far from the only blemish on the administrations much-touted green agenda. In addition toweatherization problems, an internal Labor Department report disclosed this month that a multibillion-dollar program to retrain workers for green-energy jobs met only 10 percent of its goal of creating 80,000jobs. A federal renewable-energy lab in Colorado that got nearly $300 million from another green-energyprogram began laying off 10 percent of its workforce last month.

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Overall, as the $787 billion economic stimulusthe primary engine for the green-energy agendacame toan end Sept. 30, it is clear that the program created far fewer jobs than promised. So-called green-collar jobare notoriously hard to tally, but numerous estimates by gleeful Republicans put the taxpayer cost of eachgreen-energy job created by the stimulus at more than $1 million.

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