Reality and Obama’s Big Green Budget Boondoggle

News reports indicate (even if they often try to bury) that President Obama’s supposed austerity moves include massive increases over already-inflated spending levels for ‘green energy’ boondoggles. These are very economically harmful.

To support this move, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, via its subcommittee chaired by the politically candid Bernard Sanders, will hold a [...]

Who Shut Off the Lights? Bring Back the Incandescent Lightbulb

The enviros have succeeded in destroying both the environment and jobs with their radical legislative successes. First, it was their complete stranglehold on our nation’s energy policy: no new nuclear plants, a complete ban on exploring for natural gas domestically or for drilling for oil near our coasts. This forced us into the more hazardous [...]

‘Green Jobs’ Cronyism and Economic Cannibalism

To rephrase President Obama’s State of the Union theme:  “This is our generation’s apparatchik moment.”
Yes, he said “Sputnik” instead, but his actual agenda is about the apparatchik—government by party leaders, bureaucrats and the well-connected.

His agenda is symbolized by his push for “green jobs” as the path to a better future.
Simply put, the green jobs agenda [...]

Missing the Point: Obama to Propose New Spending Initiatives

From the Wall Street Journal:

President Barack Obama will call for new government spending on infrastructure, education and research in his State of the Union address Tuesday, sharpening his response to Republicans in Congress who are demanding deep budget cuts, people familiar with the speech said.
Mr. Obama will argue that the U.S., even while trying to [...]

Anti-Energy Left Comes Unglued as ‘Green Economy’ Claims Collapse

The anti-energy lobby, surrogates for Big Wind and Big Solar, is now backed into a rhetorical corner in its effort to impose its agenda of protecting the world from the horrors of affordable, abundant energy. Remember, although they say their objective is to use policy to force invention of Flubber or pixie dust to satisfy [...]

New EPA Rules Will Cost American Jobs

A newly released economic impact study finds that the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Tailoring Rule” – a back-door Cap-and-Trade style regulation scheme that limits the greenhouse gases industries can emit – jeopardizes over 130 renewable energy projects, between 11,000 and 26,000 green jobs, and $18 billion in capital investment across the country.

Worse, that is just the [...]

Vested Interests Digging Deep to Doom California’s Prop 23

My eye-opening experience with Enron revealed to my surprise just how it is that certain interests actually drive Big Green, and make otherwise inconceivable policy ideas into threats and often even reality. The revelation was such that it left me shaking my head in wonder as to how the (now suddenly) obvious, at least seeing [...]

Obamacare Chart Redux: Proposed EPA Car Labels Deemed ‘Confusing’

At the height of debate surrounding Democrats’ proposed overhaul of the American health care system, a chart purporting to explain the complex web of regulations created by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act infamously made its way around the Internet and through congressional offices, inducing mockery of the legislation.

Now, as the Obama administration looks [...]

California Can No Longer Afford to Dream About Green Jobs

Deck chairs on the Titanic.
What state ranks third in unemployment, second in foreclosures, has the nation’s worst credit rating, is running a $19 billion deficit – yet insists on spending billions on a greenhouse gas emissions reduction plan that can’t possibly impact global warming?
Yes, it’s California, land of the Governator, who signed a bill that [...]

Big Labor, Big Auto, Big Government

Yesterday’s  E&E News PM had an item, “LOBBYING: UAW joins labor-enviro alliance”, reading in pertinent part:
The United Auto Workers has announced that it will join the BlueGreen Alliance, a partnership of labor and environment groups pushing for policies that create green jobs….
The BlueGreen Alliance was formed in 2006 by the Sierra Club and the United [...]

$2.5 Million Stimulus Project to Benefit Congresswoman’s Biggest Donor

$2.5 million of federal stimulus money went to an energy firm in the Chicago area that used the grant to build a new heating system for the headquarters of Local 150 of the International Union of Operating Engineers, located in Chicago’s southwest suburbs.
The company, Indie Energy Systems Co., LLC, is located in Evanston, IL. According [...]

China, Economic Growth and ‘Green Jobs’

The news about China overtaking Japan as the world’s second-largest economy is actually quite relevant to the US climate and energy policy debate, which promises to continue despite the scientific scandal and evaporation of political will to associate with a “global warming” or cap-and-trade legislation.

Thanks to a poll by Stanley Greenberg, the measure has been [...]

Parsing Obama’s Green Central Planning

You may have missed President Obama’s euphemism for massive wealth transfers involved in his “green economy” — central planning rebranded — that he said last week he will seek to use the Gulf oil spill to impose. That euphemism was:
“When I was a candidate for this office, I laid out a set of principles that [...]

Obamanomics is Exhausting

One way or the other, one of us is going to go down. President Obama, by insisting that he will go to the mat on his “green jobs” agenda, which is simply central planning with a coat of green paint, indicates he will risk his presidency on getting the cap-and-trade, gas tax and windmill mandate [...]

Census Reminder: Most Obama Jobs are Temporary Jobs

The item by Publius, “Census Workers Blow Whistle on Hiring Fraud“, actually reminds us of one of the Obama administration’s related scams, the “green jobs” industry. That is something that sounds a little weedy but is really quite simple, a failure to homogenize the data. This practice is employed in order to make soaring claims [...]

ShoreBank and the ‘Weatherization Underground’

ShoreBank’s connections to the White House and Capitol Hill, as well as to the green jobs movement, have been documented here at BigGovernment.com. Yesterday, Angela Caputo of Chicago Now revealed that the “community development” bank became a predatory lender in African-American and Hispanic communities when it ran short of cash.
New video evidence (after the jump) [...]

The Green Dog Not Barking in the NYT

So the New York Times is lifting the curtain — just slightly — on the bankruptcies of state that are inherently demanded by the European “social democratic model” also embraced by the Obama administration to this very hour. That’s the same administration that out, of the other side of its mouth, is pressing Europe to [...]

Global Warming: The Issue Is Not the Issue

So about two weeks ago Sen. John Kerry, a lead author of the looming Kerry-Graham-Lieberman global warming/cap-and-trade legislation said about his bill, to disassociate from Earth Day loopiness: This is not an environment bill.

No kidding. No one on the planet claims it would change the climate in any way our most sophisticated instrumentation could discern. [...]

Of Greek Columns and Green Jobs

The ultimate in Obama’s Big Government schemes that still await us is the “global warming” agenda, a necessary component of which is the “green jobs” boondoggle. “Green jobs” is certain to be a central part of the Senate’s stab at cramming down “cap-and-trade”, commencing with introduction of the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman legislation now moved back to a [...]

ShoreBank: A Key To Green Jobs

If you ask people on the street (outside of Chicago) if they have ever heard of ShoreBank, the answer would likely be “no.” While ShoreBank isn’t a Goldman Sachs, a Bank of America, or a JP Morgan, to the Progressives, this “little” bank is in many ways every bit as big and important as the aforementioned “large banks.”

Why?
One of the [...]

But Is Our Republicans Learning?

Economist John Tamny has a piece in Forbes, “The Paradox Of A ‘Giving’ Government”, detailing the new, stepped-up emphasis by business on getting cozy with Washington, and how and why it pays off. In it is a very disturbing example of why we should expect at best weak and highly dispiriting pushback from Republicans when [...]

Missing The Mass Point

As Democrats are grieving their lost super-majority in Congress, some special interests are trying to spin the loss in ridiculous ways. The latest: Union boss Leo Gerard writes that “The message of Massachusetts should be clear: If Democrats want to save their own jobs in the midterm elections this fall, they must create jobs now.”

Create [...]

Transforming the U.S. Department of Labor to the Department of Organized Labor

In their first year in office, the Obama Administration has re-made the U.S. Department of Labor into the Department of Organized Labor, working hard to make certain that those who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to put them in office get a return on their investment.? While many dismiss the importance of the Department [...]

Greens Flip: Senate Cap-and-Trade Bill ?Not a Serious Proposal?

This?story in E&EM News PM (subscription required), “Murkowski floats plan to force Senate vote on cap and trade next week”, is spectacular.

Here are the money lines, all noting Sen. Murkowski’s clever plan to simply call the Left on their rhetoric and posing about the Kerry-Boxer cap-and-trade bill S. 1733, a bill that was marked up [...]