Lachlan Markay documents for The Federalist a disturbing tale of “clean tech” investors reaping personal windfalls as the government continues to flush tax dollars down the toilet.

The confluence of “salvation and profit” has created a subset of investors who, in alliance with like-minded elected officials, have poured money into green ventures.

BusinessWeek spotted this trend in 2006. “You know a cultural movement is real when the money men get on board,” it noted in a 2006 piece on the financial sector’s increasing interest in green energy ventures. “Saving the planet, protecting America, doing God’s work, cynically exploiting a feel-good trend — call it what you will. Wall Street sees money to be made.”

Despite its promise, the cleantech experiment has not been the boon that many of these investors expected.

“Success has proven elusive even for the smartest guys in the solar-heated room,” the Wall Street Journal reported in December. “Five years after Al Gore joined the prestigious venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins to back environmentally correct companies, the collaboration has yielded few successful exits for Mr. Gore and his partners, along with some spectacular disasters.”

A recent survey found that 61% of venture capitalists expected less cleantech investing in 2013, the Journal noted.

But as DOE restarts an electric vehicle program even as some of its beneficiaries eye bankruptcy, and as it doles out more biofuel “investment” to politically connected companies such as LanzaTech, predictions of the demise of taxpayer-backed social entrepreneurship may be premature.

Even political institutions that acknowledge the financial shortfalls of cleantech investing seem determined to continue pouring money into it.

“We’re all familiar with the J-curve in private equity,” said Joseph Dear chief investment officer at the California Public Employee Retirement System in March. “Well, for CalPERS, clean-tech investing has got an L-curve for ‘lose.’”

“Our experience is this has been a noble way to lose money,” Dear added.

As long as green technology remains not simply an economic venture but a moral one, taxpayers will continue to nobly lose money as politically connected “social entrepreneurs” reap a windfall.