Free-market economists have coined the term “press release economics” to refer to state corporate welfare deals whose job projections generate round after round of favorable media reports — but seldom any follow-up when no jobs materialize.

A good example is related to a recent WikiLeaks release containing leaked emails from former Gov. Jennifer Granholm. In one letter from 2008, Granholm highlighted a company called the Mascoma Corporation that was promised state subsidies to build a wood-to-ethanol fuel processing plant. Granholm highlighted the company’s job projections as an example of her success at reinventing Michigan’s economy.

Those projections had also been the subject of many media stories for a few years before Granholm crafted the leaked email. But in 2016, eight years after she sent it, information appeared suggesting that the company received as much as $155 million in taxpayer subsidies, including $23.5 million from the state of Michigan – and no facility was ever built. In 2014, Mascoma sold its intellectual property rights to Lallemand, a private Canadian company.

Granholm’s leaked 2008 email was addressed to John Podesta, a top aide to President-elect Barack Obama. It contained a pitch that she be named the new secretary of energy and cited a media article about Mascoma.

The email she sent included an excerpt from a news publication that had this glowing description: “Granholm could hardly control her glee. Obama used some of the material her office had supplied his campaign. His 45-minute speech mentioned Mascoma, Michigan’s first-ever wood-to-clean-burning fuel plant. He used Granholm’s oft-referenced projection that Michigan has the second-best potential for wind generation and production of any state in the country. . . . By the time Obama talked about turning ‘shuttered factories’ into job-creating wind turbine and solar panel production centers, capital press corps members were rubbing their eyes to make sure Granholm hadn’t suddenly stole the microphone.”

That was just one of the several media reports repeating the narrative of how Mascoma was going to bring jobs to Michigan.

According to Newspapers.com, a newspaper archival service, the Lansing State Journal published stories on Mascoma announcements in August 2007, June 2008 and October 2008.

These articles repeated Granholm’s assertions that the plant would create 50 direct jobs and also generate as many as 700 spinoff jobs across the Upper Peninsula.

The last mainstream media reports about Mascoma were in 2012. On Feb. 13, a Detroit Free Press headline read: “After delays, plant construction to begin.”

The newspaper reported that the company had found financing via an $80 million U.S. Department of Energy grant and the backing of Valero Energy, which was set to invest $132 million into the facility. On Aug. 12 of that year, the Free Press reported that groundbreaking was once again delayed but work should be underway by year’s end.

That was the last word about Mascoma published by a Michigan news outlet. In 2013, a nonprofit news site, Midwest Energy News, reported that Valero Energy had pulled its support and the Mascoma project was all but dead.

Then a 2016 report from the advocacy news site Biofuelwatch detailed how Mascoma had taken as much as $155 million in public funding but never built the Michigan factory.

Mascoma was one of the many corporate welfare projects whose original projections garnered extensive media coverage but there was little coverage when they come up short — or didn’t appear at all.

An analysis by MIRS News in 2010 added up all the job projections in press releases the Granholm administration released between 2003 and 2010 on corporate welfare projects. The Michigan Economic Development Corporation, the lead agency for the policy, claimed credit for 1.4 million direct, retained and indirect jobs.

This number of jobs would have represented 29 percent of the entire state labor force at that time. “Direct jobs” refer to individuals that had or would be hired directly by a subsidy recipient. In September 2013, Michigan's auditor general released a report on one of the MEDC’s programs, the 21st Century Jobs Fund. It found that only 19 percent of the projected direct jobs materialized.

Leon Drolet, chair of the Michigan Taxpayers Alliance, said he doesn’t believe the media’s credulity over government economic development schemes reflects a partisan bias. Both Democratic and Republican administrations get positive press when the projects are introduced, he noted.

“It’s a bipartisan delusion,” he added.

Drolet believes the lack of follow-up reports comes from newspapers no longer having the resources to keep tabs on all the corporate welfare projects, especially since the ultimate fate of a project can take years to play out.

“In some ways, it is Amelia Earhart economics — it just disappears with no evidence of what happened,” Drolet said.

The leaked WikiLeaks emails released this month offer insight into former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s belief that she could reinvent the state’s economy.

One leaked Granholm email dated Nov. 8, 2008, was sent to John Podesta, head of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team. Midway through her second and final term as governor, Granholm was applying for the position of U.S. Secretary of Energy. She wrote: “As we briefly discussed, in Michigan I have focused like a laser on replacing our dwindling manufacturing jobs with clean tech and renewable energy jobs.”

Now, eight years after Granholm was passed over for the position, hindsight shows how ill-founded her confidence was that clean energy jobs could replace traditional manufacturing jobs.

Granholm’s email was sent in 2008, before the full force of the Great Recession had hit. But Michigan was already hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs and had been for some time.

The state had 732,300 manufacturing jobs in January 2003 when Granholm took office. By November 2008, there were just 540,300 manufacturing jobs left. The state had seen a 26 percent drop in manufacturing jobs, a loss of 192,000 jobs.

Today, eight years on, there is some employment data available for the clean energy industry suggesting how ineffective it has been as a jobs producer.

It’s not easy to track just how many jobs are created by “clean energy.” The government doesn’t have precise reporting classifications.

For example, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistic (BLS) classified “wind turbines manufacturing” along with 14 other titles such as “gas turbines manufacturing,” “steam turbines manufacturing” and “water turbines manufacturing.”

Those 14 job classifications produced a total of 89 jobs in Michigan in 2015, of which some were probably “wind turbines manufacturing.”

Battery manufacturing jobs were not disclosed by the BLS until 2011. In 2015, there were 918 battery manufacturing jobs in the state.

Other clean energy industries?

Under BLS rules, the agency could release data for jobs in wind electric power generation for 2014, though not other years. In 2014, it produced 16 jobs.

Information on solar electric power generation could not be disclosed, also due to agency rules.The BLS generally doesn’t disclose job numbers that are so small they may reveal protected information about a specific company. A company, for example, may be the only one producing jobs in that field.

The clean energy jobs are just a tiny fraction of the approximately 200,000 new jobs created and 200,000 existing jobs shed in the state in any given three-month span. (In recent years the number of jobs created has exceeded the number that disappears each quarter.)

But none of the data from the BLS in 2015 supports the theory that clean energy was the way to reinvigorate Michigan employment.