[McGINNIS] Election Day is almost here, and one of the hottest topics on the campaign trail -- energy jobs. In some candidate ads, Democrats are being accused of sending clean energy jobs to China. And that leads our MIX this week. True or false -- is Congress to blame for sending jobs abroad? Joining me, Van Jones with the Center for American Progress and an "energyNOW!" contributor, also Kenneth Green, an environmental scientist and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and, of course, Denise Bode, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association.

Thank you all for joining us. I want to get right to these attack ads running right now against some Democrats. We'll listen to these, and then I'll get your reaction.

[ANNOUNCER] Is Baron Hill running for Congress in Indiana or China? Baron Hill supported the $800 billion failed stimulus package that created renewable energy jobs in China. His big-spending programs will force us to keep borrowing money from -- you guessed it -- China.

[ANNOUNCER] While the stimulus created renewable energy jobs in China, it created mountains of new debt back here. Chris Carney. Staggering debt here. Sending jobs to China.

[McGINNIS] Van Jones already shaking his head at this one. I want to focus specifically first on the accuracy of that claim. Van, is China getting these jobs?

[JONES] First of all, if there is one clean energy job anywhere in America, you have to thank the Democrats and Obama for it. The Republicans have done nothing to get us clean energy jobs, number one. Let's look at the actual numbers. There are 80,000, for instance, coal miners in America. They're America's heroes, we're proud of them, they keep America going every day. There are 80,000 people working right now in the wind industry. There are 46,000 jobs supported by the solar industry in America. You can go into energy efficiency, et cetera. All of that is because of the leadership of this president and the Democrats in fighting to make sure we have those jobs.

[McGINNIS] Is any of the funding going to companies that have facilities overseas?

[JONES] It's inconceivable in a globalized economy that some parts don't wind up being made overseas, but if we want them made here, there's a way to do that. You get cap-and-trade -- oh, Republicans are against that. You get a renewable energy standard -- Republicans are against that. You get loan guarantees going for our clean energy companies. They're against that, too. So the Republicans are the ones that are keeping us from being able to actually have the jobs here, and then blaming Democrats.

[McGINNIS] We're in a multinational corporate environment. It's going to happen either way.

[GREEN] Absolutely, and China has a vast majority of the rare earth elements that are needed to make some of these components. Face it -- their labor rate is 50 cents an hour; California's last year was 14.5. I spoke about that the other day. So we're not likely to become a huge manufacturing power again, unless you're willing to shovel, absolutely shovel subsidies at wind and solar power.

[JONES] There is an alternative.

[BODE] Whoa! Can I answer the question?

[McGINNIS] Denise, you asked the NRCC to pull these ads, in a letter.

[BODE] They're absolutely false, and it's not me even declaring they're false, although we have all the statistics. There are only three Chinese wind turbines in the entire country out of 33,000. Politifact has actually examined these ads, which is the fact checker on behalf of journalists, and they say that it is a false claim. ABC News just published another observation saying it's not correct.

[McGINNIS] Lawrence Livermore Labs did a study. First year of the stimulus, 40% of wind farms built used components made overseas.

[GREEN] The question is not, is the entire wind turbine built in China and hauled over here and put up? The fact is, the magnets in the turbines, many components in the turbines are going to be sourced to where they're the cheapest to get.

[McGINNIS] Which is happening overseas. I want to listen to an executive from Iberdrola, a company that got a significant amount of stimulus funds -- something like $900 million -- and we talked to one of their executives -- listen to what he says.

[IBERDROLA EXECUTIVE] No stimulus dollar under this particular program can go to any project unless that project is made in the United States using U.S. workers.

[McGINNIS] But still, some components can come from overseas, and that would mean overseas jobs?

[IBERDROLA EXECUTIVE] Some components do come from overseas. The vast majority of components, the majority of components do come from the United States.

[McGINNIS] So you would say that these ads are outright false?

[IBERDROLA EXECUTIVE] Absolutely.

[McGINNIS] Ken?

[GREEN] The word "most" is the detail -- some components are from China. Now, I think the ads are a bit, they're a bit "yellow peril," they're really over-the-top.

[BODE] Thank you for saying that.

[GREEN] They pick China for the emotional value, trying to scare people about Chinese labor taking over the world, but whether they're Europeans, Australians -- it doesn't really matter. The point is the stimulus money came from Americans and it's supposed to be used to stimulate the American economy.

[BODE] And it did.

[JONES] And it did.

[GREEN] There's no evidence it did.

[BODE] Oh, yes, there is. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, who did the same study, said that 50,000 jobs were saved.

[GREEN] These are things that cannot be proven. They're counterfactual. You would have lost more jobs -- well...

[JONES] Here's what we know. If you want clean energy jobs in America, you've got to get two things right. You've got to get the public investments right, which we did with the stimulus package -- $40 billion for the Department of Energy, $80 billion overall. But you also have to get the public rules right. You have to get private capital to play.

[BODE] So more needs to be done.

[JONES] So more needs to be done, and the Republicans are the people standing in the way of getting more done.

[McGINNIS] The White House says 370,000 clean energy jobs were created by the stimulus in the first year.

[JONES] And beyond that. You have that number, which nobody's arguing with, except these crazy commercials, but the other piece is, what about the 3,600 renewable energy firms that are alive right now because this administration leaned forward with tax policy? We have an administration that's fighting for American jobs and American companies against a Republican party that will do nothing to actually help. Then they capitalize upon it in these crazy commercials.

[GREEN] See, the fact that you need subsidies like this, that you have to force Americans to buy this kind of energy --

[JONES] Oil gets subsidies, coal gets subsidies.

[BODE] It's a tax provision that is passed and is extended as part of the Recovery Act. That's all it was. We had a one-year tax provision that was extended as part of the recovery package.

[GREEN] Which others don't have.

[BODE] No, that isn't accurate. The oil and gas industry have five times more tax provisions and have been in place on a permanent basis since the 1920s.

[GREEN] They're much bigger.

[BODE] I know because I helped pass some of them in a prior job.

[McGINNIS] Denise, is this more about making the U.S. more friendly to manufacturing? There are also provisions in the tax code that reward companies here relocating overseas. Is this about, we look at those provisions instead?

[JONES] I think what we've got -- We are in grave danger of the global production for clean energy technology freezing overseas. We could go from importing dirty energy from the Middle East to importing clean energy technology from Asia and skip the jobs in the middle. The first way that you prevent that from happening is that you do what we did with the recovery package, put money on the table, but you also have to have the rules in place. What's so outrageous about these attack ads is that you're talking about a party that did everything it could to prevent the stimulus from happening -- and nobody's saying the stimulus created no jobs. People are saying that we'd be further in the hole. And they blocked every other effort to keep those renewable energy jobs here.

[McGINNIS] Some of them are going to go overseas, but we're all agreed that these ads are generally bogus?

[GREEN] I think they grossly exaggerate.

[McGINNIS] And this is only a few of them. There are tons out there.

[GREEN] I think they exaggerate.

[McGINNIS] Okay, we're going to have to end it there. Denise Bode, Ken Green, and Van Jones, thank you for your insight.

And in thehotZONE this week, could space tourism speed up climate change? Companies like Virgin Galactic and SpaceX are preparing for their first suborbital trips, ferrying paying passengers for quickie trips into space, but research, partly funded by NASA, says if the space tourism industry makes its proposed 1,000 flights a year by 2020, the soot from the rockets would hang in the stratosphere and contribute greatly to climate change. Virgin Galactic says it expects those first commercial space flights to start within the next year and a half.

Still ahead on "energyNOW!", goodbye, Styrofoam, hello, mushrooms. That's right, mushrooms. A new packing material made from shrooms, using a lot less energy to make, and it's eco-friendly -- when "energyNOW!" continues.