Written By : Dave Blount

Out of work? Underemployed? Not to worry: Comrade Obama has promised to create lots and lots of jobs by flushing $billions we don’t have down green energy boondoggles:

“We expect our commitment to clean energy to lead to more than 800,000 jobs by 2012.”

Apparently this “commitment to clean energy” is the rat hole down which much of the Porkulus loot disappeared.

Any energy initiative likely to be efficient enough to generate a profit would not need to be propped up by stolen money and bureaucratic coercion. Our rulers may as well pay people to dig holes and fill them up again as to work in the preposterous green energy sector.

For an idea of what happens when moonbat ideology drives energy policy, have a look at Spain, which the Community Organizer in Chief presents as a model for us to emulate. The Washington Examiner offers translated excerpts from Spain’s La Gaceta:

The president of the United States, Barack Obama, does not appear to have chosen well in basing his “green economy” on Spain’s. After the government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero demonized a study by various experts on the economic downsides of renewable energies, it just leaked an internal document from the Spanish cabinet which is even more negative.

Highlights:

• Green energy is 120 percent more expensive, simply due to the extra costs of solar and wind, and the evolution of the market is not going to bring down those costs any time soon.

• The clean energy sector is slated to receive 126 billion euros in the next 25 years, but no one knows where the money is going to come from. In 2009, the subsidies were worth 5 billion euros.

• Photovoltaic solar power accounts for 53 percent of the extra cost of renewables, whereas it produces only 11 percent of Spain’s renewable energy.

Spain has found that each green job comes at the expense of 2.2 real jobs.

In short, green energy is an extravagantly expensive farce that drives up unemployment. Due to a government run by the sort of idiots who buy into this malarkey, Spain is on the verge of bankruptcy, with the USA not far behind.

At least Texas is putting up some resistance:

President Obama’s EPA is already well down the path to regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, something the act was not designed to do. It has a problem, however, because shoehorning greenhouse gases into that 40-year-old law would force churches, schools, warehouses, commercial kitchens and other sources to obtain costly and time-consuming permits. It would grind the economy to a halt, and the likely backlash would doom the whole scheme.

The EPA, determined to move forward anyway, is attempting to rewrite the Clean Air Act administratively via a “tailoring rule,” which would reduce the number of regulated sources. The problem with that approach? It’s illegal. The EPA has no authority to rewrite the law. To pull it off, the EPA needs every state with a State Implementation Plan to rewrite all of its statutory thresholds as well.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Chairman Bryan W. Shaw saw the tailoring rule for what it really is: a massive power grab and centralization of authority. They are fighting back, writing to the EPA:

“In order to deter challenges to your plan for centralized control of industrial development through the issuance of permits for greenhouse gases, you have called upon each state to declare its allegiance to the Environmental Protection Agency’s recently enacted greenhouse gas regulations — regulations that are plainly contrary to U.S. laws. … To encourage acquiescence with your unsupported findings you threaten to usurp state enforcement authority and to federalize the permitting program of any state that fails to pledge their fealty to the Environmental Protection Agency. On behalf of the State of Texas, we write to inform you that Texas has neither the authority nor the intention of interpreting, ignoring or amending its laws in order to compel the permitting of greenhouse gas emissions.”

When it comes to the green agenda, as with everything else Obama et al. want to impose, remember the Alamo.

Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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