American Jobs Act

Much will be said in the coming days of President Obama's American Jobs Act, which in one form or another will very likely be the keystone policy of his re-election campaign. Whether via its victory of defeat, Obama will almost certainly campaign on its proposals and job creation ambitions.

As the National Journal's Amy Harder pointed out during the Presiden't speech, the word "energy" did not appear once in the 4000-word speech Obama gave to a joint session of Congress last week (although his slideshow did include a picture of high-speed rail). This is in contrast to this year's State of the Union, in which he omitted the words "climate change" but hit the energy innovation narrative pretty hard. Indeed, in February the President called for the elimination of federal oil subsidies to pay for a smarter, expanded clean tech policy strategy. Last week, he proposed eliminating those same subsidies in favor of extending tax credits for small businesses.

All was not lost on the energy front, however. As Energy Secretary Steven Chu pointed out on Friday, much of the investment enabled by Obama's proposed National Infrastructure Bank would be directed towards clean energy projects.

The national infrastructure bank would not only put Americans back to work, but continue to build off of the significant strides we’ve made in clean energy sector through our Recovery Act-funded Loan Program, which is set to expire on September 30th. In the past two years, the Loan Program has supported a robust, diverse portfolio of more than 40 projects that plan to employ more than 60,000 Americans and create tens of thousands of indirect jobs.

Here Secretary Chu invokes the DOE Loan Guarantee Program, recently criticized for its 2009 approval of a loan to California solar manufacturer Solyndra, which declared bankruptcy two weeks ago (laying off 1100 workers in the process). Perhaps Solyndra was the reason President Obama did not mention energy in his speech on job creation, but if the goal of a clean energy future is to be realized, policies and institutions with the financing capability of this National Infrastructure Bank will be essential.