How Obama’s Green Energy Agenda is Killing Jobs

Chairman Issa Hearing Preview Statement

Facing the worst recession since the Great Depression, President Obama has confronted this crisis by promoting green jobs as a major component of his recovery plan. He has said that these programs would create five million jobs within ten years. The President has also cited the efforts of other nations as the rationale to try to subsidize our way to energy independence.

Unfortunately, the other nations who tried this experiment have struggled to recover. After three years and billions of spent taxpayer dollars later, the American people have received very little return on the President’s investment, and this country too, struggles to recover.

A green jobs fueled recovery is a theory, and is yet unproven. Numerous elements of President Obama’s plan have been called into question. This activity includes a Bureau of Labor Statistics effort to legitimize the notion of questionably-designated green jobs by counting them as an official metric. It also includes the appearance of political favoritism in the distribution of green energy grants and loan guarantees.

The Oversight and Government Reform Committee will also examine how President Obama’s green jobs agenda has been combined with a concerted policy and regulatory campaign impacting American carbon-based energy production companies and employees.

The result is powerful and demonstrable: access to affordable and abundant domestic supplies has been restricted—with job growth and economic recovery choked in the process.

Today, unemployment is at a staggering 9.2 percent. The ill-fated green jobs experiment has done little to create jobs or speed this recovery, and by many accounts it has had the opposite effect.

By examining these challenges, Congress can then take action to remediate them by making job creation its top priority.