Could it be an improvement if Hunter Biden became the Energy Secretary?

Who knows more about energy: Hunter Biden, Jennifer Granholm, or a cat that has bitten a live lamp cord?

If the person at the wheel refuses to ask for directions, it is time for a new driver.

–Jennifer Granholm at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

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While his father was the U.S. vice president, Hunter Biden was hauling down a hefty $1 million annual salary to sit on the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm. When Mike Pence took over the vice presidency, Burisma cut the Biden spawn’s salary in half. One might assume from this that Hunter’s energy expertise is no better than that of a cat that has bitten into a live lamp cord. 

But all that and the obvious nepotism concern put aside, it’s hard to make the case that Hunter is any less qualified than the person his daddy now has in charge of the U.S. Department of Energy. 

I saved this image right after she posted it because Energy Jenny’s social media posts often age as well as Hunter’s Burisma paychecks. This one was no exception.

In a May 1 report,

Robert Bryce

brought the hammer down on what was really happening to the wind energy sector in 2023: 

[ . . .] on Wednesday, the Energy Information Administration published a report showing that U.S. wind energy production declined by 2.1% last year. Even more shocking: that decline occurred even though the wind sector added 6.2 GW of new capacity!

[ . . .] A hat tip to fellow Substack writer Roger Pielke Jr., who pithily noted on Twitter yesterday, “Imagine if the U.S. built 6.2 GW new capacity in nuclear power plants and after starting them up, overall U.S. electricity generation went down. That'd be a problem, right?”

Um, yes. It would. 

The U.S. Energy Information Administration is the “Independent Statistics and Analysis” division of . . . the U.S. Department of Energy.

It’s hard to add to the irony. If anyone was in a position to know in December 2023 that it had been a historically bad year to brag on American wind power, it was the U.S. Secretary of Energy. 

And yet . . . she did it anyway. 

Would even Hunter have done that?

In “‘Bonkers’ About Batteries: The Unauthorized Biography of Jennifer Granholm,” my May 2023 report for the Capital Research Center, I recounted her serial history of botched energy bets with tax dollars while she was the governor of Michigan. 

She predicted the state would become the “alternative energy capital of North America and the advanced battery capital of the world” while announcing an A123 Systems battery project in January 2009. Similarly, in an August 2009 announcement of a Dow Chemical lithium-ion battery partnership with Kokam America, she said the state was on track to become the “advanced battery capital of the world.” And in a July 2010 statement celebrating an LG Chem project to build batteries for electric vehicles, she pronounced Michigan the “North American battery capital.” 

Many tens of millions of dollars from the state and federal government had to be offered just to entice these projects to life. Even with the pre-bailouts, none survived.

And then back in March of this year, as the U.S. Energy Secretary, Granholm returned to Michigan to announce, along with current governor Gretchen Whitmer, the shoveling of yet more federal loot into these flames.

In a contemporaneous Substack post on the event titled “Is it still news if it's old? the Michigan media's amnesia on battery boondoggles,” I wrote:

For Bridge Magazine, the headline was “Granholm, Whitmer tout pilot training program for electric auto jobs.” At CBS News it was “Jennifer Granholm visits Michigan, announces new program to increase EV battery workforce.” And the WLNS-TV6 team in Lansing went with “Former Governor, current Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm joins Whitmer, Slotkin, Fain to talk EV batteries.” 

The old news made new(s) again was this:

“You can provide incentives for employers to come, but if you are not making sure that you have a workforce that’s trained for those jobs, those future facing jobs, then you will have missed the whole pie in the electric vehicle space,” said Granholm [. . .]

“Literally for too long, we’ve allowed other nations to lead battery manufacturing. No longer. We are going to bring the supply chain of electric vehicle production from batteries to brakes home to Michigan and home to the United States,” said Michigan Gov. Whitmer . . .

As with Hunter Biden, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that improving access to reliable and affordable energy isn’t the primary reason Granholm is holding down such an important job in the energy sector. 

In her official X/Twitter handle, that goal isn’t listed as one of her obsessions . . . or at all: