Mother Jones
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This story originally appeared on Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
On a recent episode of 60 Minutes, investigative reporter Lesley Stahl trained her eye on “The Cleantech Crash.” In the 14-minute segment, Stahl told the story of how the Obama administration and Silicon Valley venture capitalists (or, in Stahl’s phrasing, “the smart people who funded the Internet”), backed a bevy of alternative-energy startups, only to see the sector implode, leaving taxpayers holding the bag.
If this would-be exposé felt familiar, that’s because it was all over the media two years ago. Why 60 Minutes decided to drag it back into our living rooms in January 2014 is a mystery. By now, the Solyndra horse is so dead that even Fox News is tired of flogging it.
But there’s a more important reason you haven’t heard much about the “clean-tech crash” in the past couple of years: It turned out to be, in many ways, a myth. Yes, a lot of the alternative-energy startups that Silicon Valley investors flocked to five years ago have run into serious trouble. A few were among those that got government support. In the 60 Minutes segment, Stahl named nine failed or struggling companies in all—lumping in those that received government loans with some that didn’t—then declared herself “exhausted.” I guess it’s a good thing, then, that she didn’t try to name all the ones that succeeded: There are a lot more than nine of those.
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