Green Jobs

Aside from the bad environmental news you may have heard about the items listed here and here, you may also have heard good things (from the government and from TV "news" programs) about things that aren't necessarily harmless, beneficial, feasible or affordable.

That includes such things as ethanol, wind and solar power, electric cars, mass transit, fluorescent light bulbs, and 1.6 gallon toilets.  This page is about so-called "green jobs" in which people make a living while "saving the earth" from petroleum and coal.  It sounds great in a campaign speech, but as you can read below, it is an impractical idea.

This page has numerous other examples of supposedly good ideas that may not be good at all.



ARCH2 gets $30M for hydrogen hub; critics call it a 'boondoggle'.  The federal government cut its first check for a multi-state experiment to build a hydrogen-based manufacturing and energy hub in Appalachia, sending $30 million to ARCH2.  The team behind the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub expects up to $925 million from the Department of Energy to spearhead development.  "This federal funding will unlock billions of dollars in private sector investment to create thousands of well-paying jobs in Appalachia's emerging hydrogen economy," ARCH2 officials said in a press release.

The Biden Crime Family's Fisker Adventure.  Remember the Solyndra debacle?  In March of 2009, then Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the man who wanted to raise American's gasoline prices to European levels — $10.00+ — announced a $535 million loan to Solyndra, a maker of solar cells.  By August, 2011, Solyndra was bankrupt, but this was not just another tale of a green company's utopian goals in direct conflict with sound business sense. [...] Taxpayers were stiffed for more than a half billion.  This was far from the only green debacle of the Obama years.  Joe Biden, who doesn't remember he was vice president or when, did learn and remember one thing:  how to profit from green corruption.  Electric vehicle mandates and wasted taxpayer handouts have been standard operating procedure for the Biden Administration, among them, to Fisker, an electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer.  Fisker's products tended to run in the $100,000 dollar range.  Past tense because Fisker went bankrupt in July, taking some $529 million in taxpayer cash with them.

Dem Gov Touted 10,000+ EV, Battery Jobs — $1 Billion And Years Later, She's Not Close.  Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's multi-billion dollar effort to lure electric vehicle (EV)-related factories to the state has not produced the thousands of jobs she promised, according to an analysis conducted by Bridge Michigan.  Whitmer and the state government have already spent $1 billion of the $2 billion pledged to five different projects to build EV battery factories or expand EV production, but only about 200 jobs have been created, a far cry from the 12,000 jobs Whitmer has stated the companies will ultimately provide for Michiganders, according to Bridge Michigan, a Michigan-focused nonprofit publication of the Center for Michigan.  Two years after the subsidies were extended in 2022, only 2% of the jobs promised have been delivered while the state-backed projects have downsized relative to original plans or faced delays.

Shell 'planning offshore wind job cull'.  Shell is reportedly preparing to cut staff from its offshore wind business as part of a move by chief executive officer Wael Sawan to move the oil and gas giant away from the renewable energy sector.  According to Bloomberg Energy, Shell is set to begin the layoffs within months, mainly in Europe, according to sources familiar with the matter who the news service did not identify because the information is private.  The company limit's on spending has left Shell's offshore wind team in the Netherlands with less to do than previously expected, it was reported by the news service.  The staff cuts follow departures of a number of key executives in the offshore wind business, including Thomas Brostrom, the head of its European renewable power division and Melissa Read, the head of its UK offshore wind unit.

Could EVs Compete In A True Free Market?  It seems we've reached "peak EV," with sales in trouble and assembly line workers losing their jobs.  The hard truth is electric vehicle sales would have never reached the level they have if the government had not trespassed into private matters.  The EV troubles are all around.  Sales are slowing.  Unsold cars have piled up in lots.  Surveys plainly indicate that fewer Americans want them.  In response to dramatically slowing sales, Ford announced last fall that it was delaying $12 billion in EV investments.  Which should surprise no one, considering that the company lost nearly $73,000 on each EV it sold in the second quarter of 2023.  At roughly the same time, General Motors walked away from its EV strategy.  Mercedes was excited about its new EVs just a few months back but learned that customers weren't thrilled about about them.  Earlier this year Hertz decided it would dump as many as 20,000 of its EVs.  Now Tesla is laying off 10% of its global workforce, meaning around 14,000 former employees will be looking for new jobs.

Ford to trim workforce at plant that builds its F-150 Lightning as sales of electric vehicles slow.  Ford will drastically cut the number of hourly workers at its factory that builds the Ford F-150 Lightning as sales of electric vehicles slow, according to a media report.  Ford began the year by cutting production of the F-150 Lightning electric pickup after weaker-than-expected electric vehicle sales growth.  While EV sales are growing in the U.S., the pace is falling well short of the industry's ambitious timetable and many consumers are turning to hybrid vehicles instead.

Ford "Drastically" Cutting EV Lightning Workforce Hours.  On a serious note, my heart goes out to the workers who put their faith in Ford Management's defective strategic vision, and retrained as EV production line workers.  This is not the prosperous future they were promised.

Southern California bus factory shuts, 425 jobs lost, latest victim of green-vehicle slump.  In an era when clean public transportation has seemingly huge support, how can the makers of low-emission buses fail?  The latest casualty is a Southern California factory where environmentally friendly buses were made.  It's being shut down by its Wisconsin-based owners.  REV Group — which makes everything from RVs to fire trucks — decided in January to exit the mass transit business, announcing the closure of its ENC bus business and its plant in Jurupa Valley.  State documents show 425 jobs will be lost after the business winds down after completing outstanding orders.  Now, you probably don't know ENC, but you've likely ridden in one of their products.  Their legacy product was the ubiquitous airport shuttle.  The manufacturer then evolved into manufacturing mass-transit buses.

The myth of affordable green energy is over.  The pervasive narrative about offshore wind in recent years has been that costs are falling and that wind power is cheap.  But scratch below the surface and you find that things are not quite so rosy.  Turbine manufacturers have been losing money hand over fist in recent years.  Collectively over the past five years the top four turbine producers outside China have lost almost US$7 billion — and over US$5 billion in 2022 alone.  Last year the chief executive of turbine-maker Vestas said that the company lost eight per cent on every turbine sold.  Some of these losses are down to warranty issues — this means the turbines have not performed as expected requiring the manufacturers to compensate windfarm developers and rectify problems.  Privately this is attributed to the pressure for ever larger windmills which are harder to get right.  Insiders now suggest that the growth in capacity per turbine has peaked, at least for the time being.

No, Wind Power is Not Cheaper Than Gas.  Advocates of Net Zero policies repeatedly reassure the public that they are advancing cheap, green energy with the promise of vast numbers of lucrative green jobs and world leadership for the U.K. in selected green technologies.  Unfortunately for the hard pressed British electorate, 'cheap, green energy' is nothing more than an empty political slogan arrived at by a dishonest sleight of hand.  Specifically, the politicians simply ignore the true costs of the 'cheap, green energy' which soon becomes very expensive when factoring in all costs.

Why Offshore Wind Jobs May Just Be a Lot of Hot Air.  Offshore wind developers in the U.S. have promised to create thousands of "million-dollar" jobs.  But those dollars won't flow into New York workers' paychecks.  Rather, they're just the sum total of the subsidies local taxpayers and utility ratepayers will expend to keep offshore wind afloat — as if New Yorkers' electric bills aren't high enough.  Consider Ørsted, the Danish government-owned company that is developing the 12-turbine, 132-megawatt Southfork Wind and the 84-turbine, 924-megawatt Sunrise Wind projects, which will be built 30 miles east of Montauk Point, Long Island.  Ørsted is also behind the 98-turbine, 1,100 megawatt Ocean Wind project along the southern New Jersey shore, which just rewarded it with several billion dollars in tax credits that were supposed to have been returned to New Jersey ratepayers[.]

Joe Biden's bus to nowhere.  It's amazing how Democrats tout certain green companies to the public, pump government billions into them, buy the stock, cash out the stock ... and then watch them go bust.  It happened with Solyndra under the Obama administration.  Now it's happened with Proterra.  Seems the corrupt, impunity-laden Biden administration is no stranger to pump-and-dump stock schemes, which is what Fox News's Jesse Watters said was happening.  [Video clip]  Apparently these companies exist to benefit Democrats, to give them some of the cash stream that comes of these monster government spending bills that are done in the name of 'going green.'  Without this government money, these green vessels wouldn't get out of the harbor.

"Green" Jobs At Ford And GM Will Cost Taxpayers As Much As $7.7 Million Each.  Thanks to the staggering amounts of money that's being doled out under the Inflation Reduction Act to incentivize the production of electric vehicles, America's biggest automakers — General Motors and Ford Motor Company — are building battery factories.  Those new factories, one in Spring Hill, Tennessee (GM) and the other in Marshall, Michigan (Ford), will create a total of about 4,200 new jobs.  But creating those jobs will cost federal and state taxpayers nearly $22 billion.  Thus, each new "green" job at the GM plant (which the company is developing with Korea's LG) will cost taxpayers $7.7 million.  Each job at the Ford plant will cost some $3.4 million.

Offshore wind delivers one tenth of jobs promised by ministers.  The latest official estimates show that 3100 full time jobs in offshore wind in 2021.  Ten years ago the Scottish Government were championing the desire to be the green energy capital of Europe with around 28,000 jobs in offshore wind alone.  It comes as GMB Scotland has written to energy secretary Neil Gray asking for an urgent summit to ensure that the nation does not continue to get the green jobs revolution wrong.

Have unions finally figured out that the Green movement is a jobs killer?  Could it be that union bosses are finally waking up to the cold reality that the greatest threat to steel workers, the United Auto Workers, miners, machinists and the Teamsters is the radical climate change agenda of the environmentalists?  The green movement has taken the Democratic Party hostage — and President Joe Biden's all-in embrace of far-left green policies is wreaking havoc on rank-and-file union jobs.  The United Auto Workers recently announced it would withhold its endorsement of Biden as he runs for a second term.  "The federal government is pouring billions into the electric vehicle transition, with no strings attached and no commitment to workers," UAW President Shawn Fain recently declared.  "The EV transition is at serious risk of becoming a race to the bottom" for America's workers.  My only question:  Why did it take five years to figure this out?

Utility Scale Solar Kills Jobs.  Does it matter that utility scale solar has a negative effect on the environment — destroying farmland, forests, wetland, recreational land?  Does it matter that property values are driven down?  Does it matter that the mining of cobalt, lithium, rare earths and copper to build solar panels and battery energy storage systems is done by slave labor in the Congo and China?

Subsidised Green Jobs are Killing Real Jobs.  Since at least 2009, politicians of all stripes have been calling for variants of a Green Job Revolution.  Gordon Brown promised to add 400,000 new "green" jobs, taking the total to 1.3m by 2017.  More recently, the Labour Party has called for a Green Prosperity Plan to make Britain a green growth superpower.  The Liberal Democrats have their own plans for green energy and a transport revolution.  The Conservative Government has a 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution.  Of course, for the Green Party no plan from any other party is ever enough and they always urge more action more quickly.  Others, such as Ben Pile have covered the abject failure of these policies to deliver their objectives.  Suffice to say, according to the ONS, there were only 207,000 people working in the "green" sector in 2020, fewer than even the increase promised by Gordon Brown in 2009.  As was shown in earlier articles, there are lots of hidden costs to renewables and expensive electricity leads to lower productivity and economic growth.

US Offshore Wind Jobs are Highly Exaggerated.  Offshore wind supporters like to quote a Wood Mackenzie research study that says building 29,000 megawatts (MW) of offshore wind electric generating capacity on the Atlantic seaboard by 2030 will create 80,000 annual full-time US jobs between 2025 and 2030.  Extrapolating from an actual approved project leads to an estimate of only about 5,500 jobs, and even that number may be high.  Further, the study ignores possibly over 25,600 jobs potentially lost from huge electric premiums that redirect consumer and business spending elsewhere in the economy.  The Maryland Public Service Commission (PSC) recently approved the 846 MW Skipjack 2 offshore wind project off Delaware's coast.  A review[i] of the project by the PSC consultant indicates there will be 857 temporary construction jobs and 25 permanent Operational & Maintenance jobs.

The New Greenwashing — False Advertising about Green Energy Jobs.  In the private sector, false advertising can get you into legal trouble.  In the public sector, it's often good politics.  Supporters of renewable energy want you to believe that green jobs at union wages are a benefit of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA).  For example, NYSERDA CEO Doreen Harris recently boasted that for every job lost because of the green-energy transition, ten will be created.  And Governor Hochul pledged last week to prioritize union labor in the green-energy transition, and the CLCPA mandates the application of New York's prevailing wage law, which essentially requires union-standard wages and benefits be paid to workers on public construction projects, even when they far exceed market rates.  But Harris and Hochul are wrong — these jobs are a cost of the public policy, not a benefit.  And expensive prevailing wage jobs only increase the cost.

The green industrial revolution is a lie.  The Office for National Statistics (ONS) published data earlier this month which showed that the UK's 'low-carbon and renewable-energy economy' (LCREE) had not grown significantly between 2014 and 2020. This performance is a far cry from the promises of plentiful 'green jobs' and a 'green industrial revolution' that have echoed around Westminster for the past decade and more.  It turns out that the much heralded green growth was nothing more than mould.  This news should surprise no one.  As I have argued elsewhere on spiked, the green industrial revolution is a lie.  Since the 2008 Climate Change Act, successive governments have embraced the fantasy of leading the world in the 'transition' to a low-carbon economy.  And it's all been to no avail.  The rest of the world continues to increase its consumption of fossil fuels despite endless COP meetings, and Britain's green industrial revolution stubbornly fails to materialise.

Household energy bills will rise when homes are forced to switch to hydrogen heating, energy minister admits.  Household energy bills are expected to rise amid plans to force homes into using hydrogen heating.  The starting gun for a new 'dash for gas' was fired yesterday [8/15/2021] as the Government launched its strategy for Britain to burn hydrogen and create a £900 million industry in the next five years.  Energy Strategy Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said that creating a UK hydrogen industry would lead to 9,000 jobs by 2030, by which time the sector's economy would be worth £4 billion.  This would rise to 100,000 jobs and £13 billion in economic benefits by 2050, he said. [...] Hydrogen is considered a 'key pillar' in the quest to make Britain 'net zero' — or emitting zero greenhouse gases — by 2050.

The Editor says...
[#1] Any time a politician promises to create 100,000 "green" jobs, in an industry where no such jobs existed before, you can bet the farm that the actual number of jobs created in the remainder of this century will be about a thousand.  Probably less.  [#2] There is very little energy available from hydrogen gas, as opposed to methane (natural gas) or hydrocarbon fuels (coal, oil, diesel, gasoline).  The government of the U.K. has set as its primary goal the elimination of carbon dioxide.  This is futile, of course, because China and India are making no such effort.  It is also expensive.  Why not let the customers decide which fuel to use for home heating?  We call that free-market capitalism.

South Dakota rocked again as a wind turbine plant shuts its doors.  John F. Kerry, the special presidential envoy for climate, said only months ago that those losing fossil fuel jobs in coal and hydraulic fracturing will find they have a better choice of jobs in either the solar industry or as wind turbine technicians.  That was then.  Now, a wind blade manufacturing plant located in Aberdeen, South Dakota, has announced it is shutting its doors permanently in less than two months.  The disappearance of Molded Fiber Glass will displace over 300 workers and their families.  It marks another major loss of energy jobs in the state following President Joe Biden's halting of the Keystone pipeline on the first day of his administration.  MFG said in a news release that the closure will happen because of changing market conditions, foreign competition, and proposed revisions to tax policies affecting the wind energy industry in the United States.

SD wind turbine plant to shut doors, 300 jobs lost.  A major wind blade manufacturing plant is closing its doors in Aberdeen, South Dakota despite Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry claiming there would be plentiful jobs in the solar and wind turbine industries.  Kerry made those claims just months ago as the Keystone Pipeline was nixed by President Joe Biden and many jobs were lost in the coal and hydraulic fracturing markets.  The Molded Fiber Glass company will shut its doors permanently in less than two months and roughly 300 jobs will be lost.  The plant, open since 2007, produces wind turbine blades.  It will remain in operation until August 6, fulfilling existing orders here in the United States.

Biden and 'elitist environmentalists' lost at least 1,000 steel jobs in Pennsylvania.  Pennsylvania State Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward argued on "Fox & Friends" on Thursday that Scranton native Joe Biden and his administration are "partially responsible" for the cancelation of a $1.5 billion steel project, which would cost "at least 1,000 blue collar jobs" because "of their focus on only green energy."  Late last month, Pittsburgh-based United States Steel Corp. said that it is canceling the project to bring a state-of-the-art improvement to its Mon Valley Works operations in western Pennsylvania, citing the fact that the landscape has changed in the two years since the company announced its intentions.  According to the company, project permits initially stalled by the coronavirus pandemic never materialized, U.S. Steel has added capacity elsewhere and now it must shift its focus to its goal of getting rid of greenhouse gas emissions from its facilities by 2050.  [Video clip]

Green investing 'is definitely not going to work'.  From his desk in midtown Manhattan Tariq Fancy once oversaw the beginning of arguably the biggest, most ambitious, effort ever to turn Wall Street "green".  Now, as environmentally friendly investing grows at an exponential rate, Fancy has come to a stark conclusion:  "This is definitely not going to work."  As the former chief investment officer for sustainable investing at BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, Fancy was charged with embedding environmental, social and governance (ESG) corporate policies across the investment giant's portfolio.

Biden's union allies wonder where they fit in with green energy future.  President Joe Biden touted his $2 trillion infrastructure plan as a "once-in-a-generation" effort to tackle climate change while creating millions of "good paying jobs."  Some unions warn that it may ultimately cost a lot of jobs, too.  Labor groups, echoed by Republicans in Congress, are cautioning that Biden's plan to hitch the jobs recovery to massive green energy investment could backfire because of the quality of employment it will create and the economic devastation it could cause on rural communities.  The president's push to decarbonize the economy will mean eliminating the kind of steady, fixed-location jobs that come with coal mines or fossil fuel power plants.  The Biden plan would require the construction of vast numbers of solar, wind and battery projects, along with potentially new pipelines for carbon dioxide and hydrogen.

The Editor says...
Pipelines for carbon dioxide?  Is there a demand for carbon dioxide somewhere?  Pipelines for hydrogen?  Where?  Remember, even if half the voters are clamoring for this nonsense, the rest of the voters are not.

Democrats Introduce New Green New Deal Bill Calling Fossil Fuels 'Racist'The Hill reports that Rep. Always On-Camera (D-New York) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Not An Actual Cherokee) have introduced a new bill that would "invest" $500 billion to "create" "green jobs."  Use of multiple scare quotes is intentional.  Neither the race-hustling professor nor AOC know much about job creation, having never created any meaningful number of non-government jobs.  Government "investing" necessarily entails government taxing, or government just printing more money, which neither the Democrats nor The Hill note.  Those green jobs supposedly already exist anyway; why else would John Kerry tell the Keystone XL pipeline workers whose jobs his boss destroyed to go build solar panels?

Those millions of new 'green' jobs are going to China and India.  When U.S. "Special Envoy" for Climate John Kerry recently urged workers upset by the Biden administration's decision to scuttle the Keystone XL pipeline to "learn to make solar panels", he was oblivious to the fact that China and India dominate the solar panel manufacturing market.  President Joe Biden's Build Back Better Recovery Plan is to build a modern, resilient climate infrastructure that will create millions of good-paying union jobs, but Biden, like Kerry, may not be aware of America being unable to financially compete with the world's solar panel manufacturing markets without huge government subsidies.  China and India not only control the supply chain of materials for solar panels, wind turbines, and EV batteries, but also have the least stringent environmental controls for the mining of the renewable materials like lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, copper, and many others, and minimal labor laws for their low-cost labor supply.

Green Jobs Are A Myth:  A Myth Intended to Distract Attention.  During the 2020 election campaign, Joe Biden asserted that more than 3 million Americans are already "employed in the clean energy economy."  He then boasted that, "if executed strategically, our response to climate change can create more than 10 million well-paying jobs in the United States that will grow a stronger, more inclusive middle class ... and not just in cities along the coasts."  That would make Joe twice as boastful as his former boss, who promised the 2009 $787 billion stimulus package would create "over five million" green jobs.  Four years later, the Brookings Institution reported that, "of the nearly 2.7 million 'green jobs' [the Obama-Biden Administration] identifies, most were bus drivers, sewage workers and other types of work that don't fit the 'green jobs of the future'" description.

Renewables Sector Reels As 150,000 German 'Green' Jobs Evaporate.  The great 'green' jobs 'bonanza' is being revealed for the hoax that it truly is.  And nowhere is that reality harsher, than in Mutti Merkel's Germany.  Plastered in solar panels (albeit blanketed in snow and ice at the moment) and overrun with 30,000 of these things, Deutschland has been held up as a renewable energy 'superpower' by the wind and solar cult, across the globe.  A bitter, breathless winter has left them scrambling for the only reliable power source in town:  coal-fired power from their own remaining plants and from Poland, and nuclear power from France.  One of the promises of its 'transition' to an all wind and sun powered future — aka the 'Energiewende' — was an endless sea of 'groovy' sustainable employment in the manufacture of solar panels and wind turbines.

Green Jobs Collapse in Germany and Go to China Instead.  What a Surprise!.  'Green jobs' in the German renewables sector have collapsed by 50 per cent in less than a decade.  No prizes for guessing where they've gone instead — but here's a clue: it begins with 'C' and ends with '-hina'. [...] There are two key points to be made here.  First, China is not remotely interested in green issues — or 'clean' energy — except insofar as it enables it to gain a competitive advantage over the West while it continues full steam ahead with its fossil fuel-powered industries.  Second, the 'green jobs' promised by everyone from President Joe Biden to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson as one of the benefits of their proposed Net Zero revolutions are a myth.  Or, if you prefer, a blatant lie.

Peter Doocy Blasts Jen Psaki: 'When Do [Union Workers] Get Their Green Jobs?'.  During Monday's [2/8/2021] White House press conference, Fox News's Peter Doocy asked the White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, where are the Biden administration's so-called "green jobs" for unemployed union and construction workers.  On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order that revoked a key permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline, which was designed to more efficiently move oil from Canada to the United States.  The Biden administration's proposed green jobs plan has promised to create more than 10 million "well-paying jobs in the United States," though no immediate legislation or executive order has been proposed to create such jobs.  In a tense exchange, Doocy asked the press secretary where these "green jobs" are and when unemployed Keystone XL Pipeline workers can expect to apply for them.

Jen Psaki mocks reporter when asked about Keystone pipeline job losses.  White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Monday [2/8/2021] mocked a reporter who asked when workers on the canceled Keystone XL pipeline would get "green jobs" promised by President Biden.  It's expected that up to 11,000 jobs will be lost following Biden's day-one decision to immediately shut down construction of the pipeline that was supposed to carry oil from Canada to Texas — leaving South Dakotans reeling and 1,000 people immediately out of work.  "Where is it that they can go for their green job?"  Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked Psaki at her Monday afternoon press briefing, referring to Biden's promise to create good-paying union jobs in the green energy sector as his administration attempts to end the nation's reliance on fossil fuels.

Biden's Rapidly Deflating Honeymoon Balloon.  The administration has been buffeted by the incongruity of shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline and throwing 11,000 Americans out of work (and up to 40,000 Canadians, with whom Biden has committed to "rebuild alliances"), throwing another 10,000 Americans out of work by shutting down oil and gas exploration in federal lands, accepting the backbreaking yoke of the Paris climate undertakings that involve the disemployment of scores of thousands of other Americans; all while promising to open up the borders, raise the minimum wage, and recycle all the displaced energy industry workers into the manufacture of solar panels and windmills.  Some may remember the Obama promises of "green, American, union jobs," (which never materialized and won't now).

John Kerry, Global Warming Ghoul.  Presidential climate envoy John Kerry stirred up a black cloud last week when he said the workers who lost their jobs over the administration's decision to shut down Keystone XL pipeline construction could just make solar panels instead.  At least he didn't tell them they should learn to code.  But it was a cruel comment nonetheless, and representative of the political left's careless destruction of livelihoods in service of their climate god.  At a news conference last week, Kerry said "what President Biden wants to do is make sure that those folks" who lost jobs "have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the people who go to work to make the solar panels."  Unsaid yet clearly understood is the Democrats' contempt for calloused-hand working class Americans — these "deplorables" just can't make good decisions and need the guiding hand of government to help them avoid the briar patches and potholes of life.

WaPo: Two Pinocchios For Kerry's Wind-And-Solar Jobs Claims.  If you missed John Kerry's remarks on the job-destruction impact from Joe Biden's executive orders on climate change, let's refresh memories first.  Reporters asked Kerry how the new administration would explain to hundreds of thousands of energy workers about the necessity of making them unemployed, Kerry suggested that they could "make better choices," and told reporters that they should learn to build solar panels instead. [...] Obama, Kerry, and Biden had eight years to prove the assertion that massive government subsidies in renewable energy would pay off with "millions" of green-tech jobs.  Remind us again how many wind and solar installer jobs America currently has 12 years after the massive Porkulus bill?  The most significant lie here isn't Kerry's statistical claims.  It's that this administration cares one whit about energy-sector jobs while they take every step they can to destroy them without viable employment or energy options.

One week in, Biden administration shows its exquisite cruelty.  [Scroll down]  President Trump energized our economy, made us energy independent.  Biden has in the span of a week tanked it in order to make us dependent on Saudi Arabia again.  He is about to ban coal-mining, too.  What will happen to those miners?  These green jobs he claims all those suddenly unemployed workers are going to transition to do not exist.  The arrogant Buttigieg, the new transportation secretary, a job he is uniquely unqualifed for, when Ted Cruz asked what would happen to those people, snarkily replied, "They'll get other union jobs."  Exactly where and when he did not say.  He can't.  Those jobs do not exist.  This is a nasty group of radicals, this Biden Cabinet of now out-of-the-closet communists.  They are wildly overreaching in a country that is based on individual liberty.

Get ready for more Obama-era green energy scams.  With Democrats about to control all the levers of power in Washington, the biggest winners might be the wind and solar companies.  These firms' stocks continue to surge mostly because President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to invest several hundred billion dollars in green energy through a pipeline of taxpayer-funded grants, loans, tax credits and loan guarantees.  This game plan looks suspiciously like a replay of the litany of green "stimulus" fiascoes that Biden piloted as vice president back in 2009 with the $800 billion Obama stimulus plan.  The experiment in the government as an investment banker belly-flopped with embarrassing failures from Solyndra, Fisker Automotive and Abound Solar.  Taxpayers lost billions of dollars on these lemons.

Green Jobs?  What Green Jobs?  On the campaign trail in 2008, candidate Barack Obama promised he would create 5 million new green jobs.  Months later, the Obama-Biden Administration took office supported by a majority in the House and a nearly filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.  The $800 billion stimulus package they passed focused on fulfilling the 5-million-job promise.  It was a tragi-comedic disaster.  Together, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Department of Labor's inspector general issued four reports on green jobs.  The Obama-Biden green-jobs programs failed so spectacularly the administration defunded all future reports.  Not only did Obama-Biden not create 5 million new green jobs, they could not document even half that many total (new and pre-existing).  Even this failure was after the BLS broadened the definition of a green job in an attempt to get bigger totals. [...] Though the jobs promise was broken, the spending promise was not.  The big, green chunk of the $800 billion stimulus package went to a list of projects of which no one would be proud and that were owned by a group of corporations not needing subsidies.

Clean energy has shed nearly 600,000 U.S. jobs due to pandemic: report.  The U.S. clean energy sector has lost 17% of its work force, or nearly 600,000 jobs, as stay-at-home orders halt production of components from solar panels to electric cars and slow installations at homes and businesses, according to a report released on Wednesday [5/13/2020].

The Billionaire And The 'Moderates' Are Socialists Too.  Socialism vs. centrism is a charade.  The only choice among all these candidates is between Bernie and Bernie Lite. [...] The Vermont socialist also tried to assuage worries about the Green New Deal, the cost of which could exceed $90 trillion, by promising it would provide "up to 20 million good-paying jobs as we move our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy," adding, "this is a moral issue, my friends."

The Editor says...
Yes, I would say "20 million good-paying jobs" is right, aside from the atrocious grammar, because spending $90 trillion to produce 20 million jobs means the jobs cost $4,500,000 each, paid for by the rest of us.

Joe Biden is coming for your job.  Seems it's not enough for the such leftists to come for your toilet paper, your salt shaker, your meat, your SUV, or your air conditioner, Biden wants your job, too.  Your livelihood.  All for your own good.  Oh sure, he promises to replace it with something else, something green, see, as the state central planners dictate.  We all know well that worked out last time Biden got his way and did what he could in the Obama administration to put coal miners out of business.

Barack Obama, the real king of the quid pro quo.  It's only with Trump that Democrats seem to have gleaned a sense of conscientiously objecting to what they perceive as abusing one's high office to obtain political or personal favors.  Where were they with Obama? [...] The Westly Group funded, among other companies, Tesla Motors.  And all the while he was visiting the White House, serving as a member of the Obama administration's advisory board on energy policy, and so forth and so on, he was raking in half a billion dollars in loans, grants and stimulus bucks for his green companies.  That was money from the Obama Energy Department to [Steve] Westly, the guy who wined and dined with Obama et al with eyebrow-raising frequency.

California raises the caution flag on 'green jobs'.  California's mixed record of using public investments and environmental mandates to create "green jobs" raises serious questions about the promises of some Democratic presidential candidates to use economy-transforming investments in environmentally friendly technologies to put millions of people to work.  Many of the initiatives touted by the candidates in their environmental plans are already in place in California, and some of them having been promoted as important engines of job creation.  But California stopped counting green jobs in 2013, struggling to separate truly new jobs from existing employment growth.

Sanders puts out massive plan to fight climate change.  Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 White House hopeful, on Thursday [8/22/2019] unveiled his sweeping Green New Deal to tackle climate change, a plan he says would take on "the single greatest challenge facing our country" and create 20 million jobs.  "This is a pivotal moment in the history of America — and really, in the history of humanity.  The climate crisis is not only the single greatest challenge facing our country; it is also our single greatest opportunity to build a more just and equitable future, but we must act immediately," said Sanders.

The Editor says...
Can Bernie Sanders prove there is a "climate crisis," or any extraordinary change in world-wide weather?  Yes, it's a lot hotter than it was six months ago, but that's a condition called, "summer."  What exactly will 20 million people do, that will stop the climate from changing?  Who will pay these 20 million people?  What are those 20 million people doing today?  Must they all earn a "living wage?"  Will they all qualify for paternity leave, taxpayer-funded abortions, and sex-change operations?  Must they all be U.S. citizens?  Will they all be unionized, so that a large portion of their dues will go straight to the Abortion Party?  Is the weather really the "the single greatest challenge facing our country?"  Not China, Iran, or North Korea?  Not Islam, Antifa, or Fake News?  The answers should be obvious.

Green Jobs:  The Antithesis of Efficiency.  The best way to measure the usefulness of energy sources is not by the number of jobs they create, but by the benefits they provide.  Getting the biggest gain for the least resources should always be the goal, meaning we should measure energy by its output, not the size of its payroll.  Current green energy literature shows us why.  A recent Clean Jobs America report claims there are 3.3 million clean energy jobs nationwide.  That number is nearly three times the 1.15 million jobs in the fossil fuel industry.  It's a big and impressive statistic, but it's misleading for a couple of reasons.  First, unless clean energy jobs were providing at least triple the output of traditional sources, it wouldn't make sense to say that having 3 million jobs is necessarily better than 1 million.

Liz Warren Pitches Climate Change 'Jobs' Plan.  It Costs $2 Million Per Job.  Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren laid out her $2 trillion plan to fight global warming while creating jobs, mirroring the goals of the highly-publicized Green New Deal.  Warren, who's running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, proposed Tuesday [6/4/2019] three major policy programs to spend $2 trillion over a decade to create one million jobs — that comes out to one job for every $2 million spent.

Warren unveils $2 trillion "Green Manufacturing Plan".  2020 candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren released her "Green Manufacturing Plan" Tuesday [6/4/2019], a $2 trillion proposal to develop the technology needed to power the Green New Deal over the next decade.  Warren is seeking to strike a progressive tone that focuses less on regulations and explicit goals and more on manufacturing and jobs than some other Democratic candidates as divisions emerge between the party and labor unions over the Green New Deal.

AOC's Green New Deal could have Dems facing blue-collar backlash at polls, some say.  California knows about fault lines.  And political observers in the Golden State say the Democrats' proposed Green New Deal may be a fault line that splits the party's support — in California and elsewhere.  The environmental high-mindedness of the plan for combatting climate change — put forth by Democratic U.S. Reps.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ed Markey of Massachusetts — appeals to the "elite" professionals the party has been courting for years.  But the potential disruption for the American labor, in which untold numbers of employees might have to transition from "old economy" jobs to "green economy" jobs, may be offputting for many blue-collar workers — potentially turning many of them away from Democratic candidates at the polls, some political observers say.

8 Times Barack Obama Abused His Power To Appease His Base.  [#7] Obama's failed "green energy" loans:  Obama was so committed to creating a new "green economy" that he earmarked $80 billion for clean energy loans, grants, and tax credits as part of his economic stimulus for green energy companies in a highly politicized process benefiting companies that supported him.  We all know how that turned out.  At least fifty Obama-backed clean energy companies went bankrupt or found themselves in major financial trouble.  The most well-known example is Solyndra, which received more than a half-billion dollar loan despite the fact the Department of Energy (DOE) knew they were on the verge of bankruptcy.  Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden were personally involved in the decision-making process to determine who got loans.

Green New Deal Is Bad Deal for All Americans.  Any time the government tries to "provide jobs," you can expect a boondoggle at best (especially when the number promised is 16 million).  The most successful way to create jobs is a business-friendly environment, which is the exact opposite of the Green New Deal's massive regulations, spending, taxes, and all other anti-free-market strategies.

China Exposes the Recycling Scam's Dirty Secret.  The huge dirty secret of recycling was also one of the world's worst polluters.  Every branch of government from Washington D.C. to your local town council had spent a fortune convincing people that recycling is a magical process that turns your old pizza boxes into new pizza boxes while creating those imaginary "green jobs" in the community.  The reality was a lot dirtier.

Wind turbine on fire
Green Job Hazards:  Wind Energy, Wind Farms, Wind Turbines, Fire and Crane Safety.  Wind Energy workers are exposed to hazards that can result in fatalities and serious injuries.  Many incidents involving falls, severe burns from electrical shocks and arc flashes/fires, and crushing injuries have been reported to OSHA.


Here are 1,366 well sourced examples of Barack Obama's lies, lawbreaking, corruption, cronyism, hypocrisy, waste, etc..  [#25] In 2009 the Obama administration gave $535 million to Solyndra, claiming that it would create 4,000 new jobs.  However, instead of creating those 4,000 new jobs, the company went bankrupt.  It was later revealed that the company's shareholders and executives had made substantial donations to Obama's campaign, that the company had spent a large sum of money on lobbying, and that Solyndra executives had had many meetings with White House officials.  It was also revealed that the Obama administration had already been aware of Solyndra's financial troubles.  For example, according to the company's security filings in 2009, the company had been selling its product for less than the cost of production.  In 2010, Obama visited the Solyndra factory and cited it as a role model for his "stimulus" program, saying "It's here that companies like Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future."

Twenty-One Bad Things About Wind Energy.  [#8]  Knowing full well that the assertions used to date were specious, wind proponents manufactured still another claim: green jobs.  This was carefully selected to coincide with widespread employment concerns.  Unfortunately, when independent qualified parties examined the situation more closely, they found that the claims were wildly exaggerated.

Inconvenient energy fact:  It takes 79 solar workers to produce same amount of electric power as one coal worker.  In an April 25 New York Times article ("Today's Energy Jobs Are in Solar, Not Coal") reporter Nadja Popovich wrote that "Last year, the solar industry employed many more Americans [373,807] than coal [160,119], while wind power topped 100,000 jobs."  Those energy employment figures are based on a Department of Energy report released earlier this year that provides the most complete analysis available of employment in the energy economy.  But simply reporting rather enthusiastically (see the NYT headline again) that the solar industry employs lots of Americans, more than twice as many as the number of coal miners and utility workers at electric power plants using coal, is only telling a small part of the story.

The left's misleading green jobs claims.  In absolute numbers, the U.S. Department of Energy reports solar power employed 43 percent of the electric power generation sector's workforce in 2016, employing more than 374,000 workers who construct, assemble, sell or install solar panels.  Fossil fuels combined accounted for just 22 percent (187,000) of the jobs directly tied to generating electric power.  Although there are a significant number of solar-related jobs, the often-repeated figures above are very misleading for numerous reasons, of which I'll name a few.

Axing Wasteful EPA Program that Gave Leftist Groups Millions "Racist".  Over the years, heaps of taxpayer dollars have filled the coffers of leftwing groups — including some dedicated to helping illegal immigrants — that teach black, Latino and indigenous folks how to recycle, reduce carbon emissions through "weatherization" and participate in "green jobs."  The cash flowed freely through the EPA's special environmental justice office, which the Trump administration plans to get rid of as part of a broader budget cut for the famously bloated agency.  This is great news for American taxpayers who were forced to fund this nonsense.

Green Energy is a Charter For Crooks And Liars.  The Scam Must End Now.  When is the rest of the Western world going to catch up with Donald Trump and point out that the green emperor is wearing no clothes?  I ask as a concerned UK taxpayer absolutely sick to death of the vast sums of money that continue to be funnelled into the pockets of crooks, liars, spivs, chancers, con-artists and fantasists in the name of solving the non-existent problem of "climate change."

DOD Is Leasing Land To Green Energy Companies For Free.  The Department of Defense (DOD) allowed private companies to build green energy projects on federal lands for little or no compensation, according to an audit of the Pentagon's green energy efforts.  Government Accountability Office (GAO) auditors reviewed 17 green energy projects on DOD land and found 14 of those projects were, "not always clear about the value of the land used and the compensation DOD received for granting such use."  "Specifically, for 8 projects, DOD received little or no financial compensation for the use of its land, but the documentation did not clearly compare the value for granting use of DOD land to the value of what DOD received for it," GAO found.  "As a result, DOD contributed potentially valuable land — in some cases, over 100 acres — for the development of a project without including this as a cost in project documentation."

Crony Capitalism and the Spigot of Government Subsidies.  Tesla secured nearly $1.3 billion in benefits from a variety of sources, including money from Nevada to set up a car battery factory, federal subsidies through the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program, and a number of federal and state tax breaks for the purchase of Tesla vehicles (such as the $7,500 federal tax credit and a $2,500 California rebate).  Why would so much in government subsidies go to produce a car that only a few Americans can afford?  The new Tesla Model S ranges from $80,000 to nearly $115,000 before tax credits and rebates.

Climate Activists Push Study Showing 3.8 Million Lost Jobs from Renewable Energy Transition.  A recent study outlining a "roadmap" for transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy would cause a significant loss of permanent jobs, based on a review by Energy In Depth.  The research has been widely cited by anti-fossil fuel activists, whose advocacy includes the supposed job benefits of replacing oil, natural gas, and coal with renewable technologies like wind and solar.  The study, whose lead author is Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson, was published last summer in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Mega-solar company slashing jobs despite gov't benefits.  The solar industry seemed to be looking at a bright future in 2016 as Congress renewed an endangered tax break for another five years.  Yet, in a troubling sign for a business continuously infused with such government benefits, America's largest solar contractor may be facing its worst year on record.  SolarCity, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, is now contending with mass layoffs, plummeting stock and mounting debt.  "This is what happens when you have a government that artificially props up a sector with subsidies so it can generate more production than they otherwise would," said energy analyst Nick Loris, a research fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation.

SolarCity Is Slashing 550 Jobs.  Solar panel installer SolarCity said it would cut 550 jobs in Nevada, two weeks after the state's utilities commission approved changes that would reduce credits customers receive for selling excess solar power to the grid.

'Four Times Greater Than Solyndra': DOE Drops 1,200 Pages Of Heavily Redacted Docs On Green Energy Loans.  The Department of Energy recently turned over more than 1,200 pages of heavily redacted documents in response to a records request about a subsidized biofuels company from The Daily Caller News Foundation.  In October, TheDCNF filed a FOIA request with the Energy Department, asking for email records from government officials regarding federal loan guarantees given to Abengoa, a Spanish-based green energy company.  The request came on the heels of reports Abengoa was running into big financial problems, despite being given generous taxpayer-backed loans.  The DOE gave TheDCNF the records it requested Dec. 18, and after spending time reviewing the documents, it's apparent there's a lot of information the department did not want the public to see.  The DOE redacted virtually all information specific to Abengoa — in many cases whole pages were blacked out.

Another Obama Clean Energy Fiasco, Potentially Involving Largest Bankruptcy in Spanish History.  On the clean energy front, team Obama keeps plugging away with failure after failure.  This go around involves a clean energy company in Spain that increasingly appears as if it will become the largest bankruptcy in Spanish history.

Congressman on Going Green: Minorities Won't Be Hurt by Eschewing Fossil Fuels.  Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, pushed back against politicians who argue that hurting the fossil fuel industry would adversely impact the poor, saying a "minimal" amount of minorities are working in the industry. [...] Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), a member of the House Financial Services Committee, advocated for the implementation of zero waste policies.  "Did you know that no animal other than us creates waste?  We're the only ones who have waste.  Nobody else has garbage cans because everything else is usable in some kind of way but we throw stuff in garbage cans like it's useless.

The Editor says...
Anyone who has ever shoveled muck out of a barn, cleaned a bird cage, or maintained an aquarium, knows that all animals create waste.

Politicians Keep Chasing the Green Jobs Fantasy.  In the famous children's story, Jack and the Beanstalk, a young boy plants "magic" seeds and overnight a beanstalk grows as high as the sky.  The obvious fantasy has a surprising real world counterpart through politicians who claim that by spending billions of taxpayer dollars on "green energy projects," some will take off and magically create millions of jobs.  Like the story, those claims are more fiction than reality, yet politicians continue to tell the tale over and over again.  President Barack Obama pledged during his campaign to "invest" $150 billion in alternative energy companies, promising that it would create five million new jobs.  But when the smoke cleared all that remained was crony handouts to the politically connected.

Green energy company fights for life after getting billions from feds.  Abengoa, a renewable energy multinational company headquartered in Spain, has been a favorite of the Obama administration in getting federal tax money for clean energy projects.  Since 2009, Abengoa and its subsidiaries, according to estimates, have received $2.9 billion in grants and loan guarantees through the Department of Energy to undertake solar projects in California and Arizona — as well as the construction of a cellulosic ethanol plant in Kansas.  But in the space of less than a year, Abengoa's financial health has become critical, leading investors to worry whether the company can survive.

In China, the true cost of Britain's clean, green wind power experiment: Pollution on a disastrous scale.  [The Daily Mail] has uncovered the distinctly dirty truth about the process used to extract neodymium:  it has an appalling environmental impact that raises serious questions over the credibility of so-called green technology.  The reality is that, as Britain flaunts its environmental credentials by speckling its coastlines and unspoiled moors and mountains with thousands of wind turbines, it is contributing to a vast man-made lake of poison in northern China.  This is the deadly and sinister side of the massively profitable rare-earths industry that the 'green' companies profiting from the demand for wind turbines would prefer you knew nothing about.

The President's Clean Energy Farce.  Green energy investments are a guaranteed flop, the kind of failure only a shady Broadway producer could envision.  This current green energy production really got underway when the economic "stimulus" set aside $80 billion to subsidize politically connected energy projects, according to the Heritage Foundation.  Since the halcyon days of the stimulus, 1,900 investigations have been opened to probe stimulus fraud and about 600 convictions have been secured by prosecutors.  What is more, about 10 percent of the Obama-backed green companies have gone bankrupt or out of business.  But Obama does not let the facts get in the way of a good, green story.

No one showed up for California's green jobs rush.  In 2012, California voters were peppered with grandiose promises, such that they could not resist approving Proposition 39. [...] Naturally, it did not work at all.  On Monday, the Associated Press reported that the program has "created" just 1,700 jobs in three years — just under 600 jobs per year or roughly five percent of what was promised, at the cost of $175,000 per job.  Even that paltry figure fails to account for opportunity costs — i.e. jobs lost statewide because of the forced diversion of economic resources away from productive industries and toward green energy.  The number of net jobs created is likely zero or less than zero, which is to say that probably a few hundred or a few thousand jobs have been destroyed so far at a cost of $300 million.

California measure fails to create green jobs.  Three years after California voters passed a ballot measure to raise taxes on corporations and generate clean energy jobs by funding energy-efficiency projects in schools, barely one-tenth of the promised jobs have been created, and the state has no comprehensive list to show how much work has been done or how much energy has been saved.

Feds pour $32 million more into beleaguered solar industry.  This latest funding is dedicated to training a workforce of solar technicians, developing new technology and implementing a database to share performance data, the DOE announced in a press release last week.  The training goal is 75,000 workers by 2020 and an undisclosed amount of "other professionals" in other fields such as real estate, finance, insurance and fire and safety.  What the release didn't say was that the Obama Administration has spent $150 billion on green initiatives between 2009 and 2014, yet the industry cannot survive without government giveaways, a Brookings Institution study found.

Obama-backed green energy failures leave taxpayers with $2.2 billion tab.  Taxpayers are on the hook for more than $2.2 billion in expected costs from the federal government's energy loan guarantee programs, according to a new audit Monday [4/27/2015] that suggests the controversial projects may not pay for themselves, as officials had promised.  Nearly $1 billion in loans have already defaulted under the Energy Department program, which included the infamous Solyndra stimulus project and dozens of other green technology programs the Obama administration has approved, totaling nearly about $30 billion in taxpayer backing, the Government Accountability Office reported in its audit.

Pres. Obama announces solar program to employ veterans.  Standing next to an array of solar panels at Hill Air Force Base, President Barack Obama announced Friday [4/3/2015] the base will participate in a new program aimed at employing veterans in the solar energy industry.  The Solar Ready Vets is part of the administration's overall goal of employing 75,000 people around the country in the solar energy industry by 2020. HAFB will join four other military installations already participating in a pilot program.

Obama Announces Plan to Train 75,000 Solar Workers.  The White House has announced a goal to train 75,000 workers in the solar industry by 2020, many of them veterans.  "These are good-paying jobs that are helping folks enter the middle-class," President Barack Obama said on Friday [4/3/2015] at Hill Air Force Base in Utah.  The plan will expand on the Department of Energy SunShot Initiative's Solar Instructor Training Network currently running at more than 400 community colleges.

Obama misleads students about climate and energy.  The International Renewable Energy Agency reports that worldwide investment in renewables (not counting large hydropower) amounted to an incredible $214 billion in 2013 alone!  IRENA insists that these expenditures need to more than double by 2030, to achieve the impossible goal of restricting average global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.  However, results to date show that those investments have brought few benefits, and much harm.  European studies have found that expensive, unreliable wind and solar power kills two to four jobs for each "renewable" energy job this heavily subsidized industry creates.

The 5 Million Green Jobs That Weren't.  In 2008 candidate Barack Obama promised to create 5 million green jobs. [...] The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 set aside $90 billion in renewable energy grants and loans for a grab bag of thousands of projects -- wind farms, solar installations, natural gas fueling stations, biofuel research, and a $5 billion weatherization project for low-income homes.  Digging into the public records of the $21 billion spent so far through 19 U.S. Department of Energy programs reveals 3,960 projects that employ 28,854 people.  That's not 5 million.

Unemployed take their case to Fed officials at Jackson Hole.  Reginald Rounds was among those present at the Federal Reserve's high-flying monetary conference here, enjoying the chance to button hole two top officials of the U.S. central bank.  The St. Louis resident is neither an economist nor a central banker.  He's a 57-year-old unemployed worker, who said he is trained in the green technology field and can't find a job.

Where Have All the Green Jobs Gone?  Five years ago, "green jobs" were all the rage in Washington.  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was rolled out with a win-win agenda aimed at fixing the economy and healing the environment at once.  Candidate Obama touted a "blueprint" for a green economy, with plans to create 5 million green jobs.  Then the stimulus sparked hopes of a Green New Deal -- direct job creation to transition the workforce to a low-carbon economy, plus industrial policy to drive investment in green infrastructure and solar and wind sectors.  Today, the green has begun to wilt.

'Clean Energy' Ruined Spain; now Obama is Dragging the US Over the Same Green Precipice.  "Feeding the masses on unicorn ribs".  That was how Walter Russell Mead once poured scorn on Obama's misbegotten attempts to revive the US economy by creating five million "green jobs."  Mead was quite right, of course.  And there was plenty of evidence to back him up, such as the 2009 report by a Madrid university professor Gabriel Calzada Alvarez that for every expensive "green job" created by government subsidy, 2.2 jobs were destroyed in the real economy.  The Obama administration responded as only the Obama administration knows how:  by calling in its left-wing attack dogs.

Another Obama-backed 'green' company leaves a trail of unpaid bills and broken promises.  "Come see what's going on at Smith Electric," the president said, inspecting a table full of bright green truck batteries in what was once a maintenance hangar for TWA.  "I think they're going to be hard-pressed to tell you that you're not better off than you would be if we hadn't made the investments in this plant."  The skeptics turned out to be right.  Despite $32 million in federal stimulus funds and status as one of Obama's favorite "green" companies, the firm has halted production, having built just 439 of the promised 510 vehicles.

Greens Are Reds.  Environmentalists used to fantasize that their policy mandates would lead to "green jobs" for working men and women, but that bubble popped awfully fast.  Just ask the Germans, who are ditching expensive green wind and solar projects as fast as they can to save their flagging economy.

A Tale of Two Cities.  The U.S. metro area with the lowest unemployment rate is a shale oil boomtown.  The one with the highest unemployment rate houses the world's largest solar plant.  Energy policy experts are pointing to that dichotomy as evidence that job creation potential in the energy industry lies primarily with fossil fuels, despite the administration's insistence on creating a "clean energy economy."  According to data released on Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Midland, Texas, has a 2.9 percent unemployment rate, the lowest in the country. [...] In contrast to the successes of those oil and gas boomtowns, Yuma, Ariz., is facing the highest unemployment rate of any U.S. metro area at a whopping 26.1 percent.  Yuma is the site of the Agua Caliente solar plant — the largest photovoltaic solar generation facility in the world.

Washington State Senate Reexamines Solar Power Incentives.  The Washington Senate Energy, Environment & Telecommunications Committee held a January 30 session to examine federal, state, and local incentives given to the solar power industry.  James M. Taylor [...] noted jobs created in the solar power industry by government subsidies or market share carve-outs are not jobs created at all.  Instead, he noted, they are merely jobs shifted away from the conventional power sector, where the workers would be producing more-affordable electricity that leaves more money in people's pockets to purchase goods and services across the entire economy and produce additional jobs there.

The myth of green-job creation.  The concept of green jobs and a green economy is popular among politicians and policy-makers.  That is understandable, as they want to be perceived as doing something about the environment or climate change while simultaneously protecting jobs and the economy.  Green jobs are considered to be a way of addressing two policy issues at once:  employment and the environment.  Policy-makers can argue that green-job creation will compensate for jobs lost due to more stringent environmental policy.  But what are "green jobs"?

Energy Dept. failed to report concerns as green-tech firm was heading for bankruptcy.  The Department of Energy failed to disclose concerns about a green-technology company that won $135 million in federal funding but ended up filing for bankruptcy in September, according to a watchdog report released this week.  DOE Inspector General Gregory Friedman noted that the firm, San Francisco-based Ecotality, is still due to receive $26 million from the agency for testing electric vehicles.

The Green Jobs Scam.  Although the Solyndra bankruptcy served as a glimpse into the use of tax dollars for political purposes in order to benefit Obama's cronies, the story is not over.  In total, $150 billion, including $80 billion from the stimulus, is supposed to be spent on "green energy" projects between 2009 and 2014.  So far, 33 companies that were provided $7.4 billion in tax dollars have either gone bankrupt, are declaring bankruptcy or are on the edge.  And this is just the beginning.  Even The Washington Post agrees that the entire "green energy" program has been "infused with politics," with Obama supporters invested in green energy companies selected for stimulus funds, and others joining the administration to oversee the program.

Our Cash For Obama's Clunkers.  The last five years of American economic policy has been a sad and expensive replay of what governments should never do.  Amidst the uproar over the pathetic ObamaCare website rollout, many Americans missed the stinging report about Obama's Cash for Clunkers program.  Not surprisingly, it was a failed program that cost us $1.4 million for each job allegedly created — a perfect representation of the failure of government-led economies.

Shades of Solyndra: Team Obama mum as another green energy firm went bust.  Failing to heed the lessons of the Solyndra debacle, Energy Department officials kept quiet about their knowledge that a government-backed electric car charger company was sliding toward bankruptcy and putting taxpayer money at risk, the agency's chief watchdog has found.  Inspector General Greg Friedman admonished department officials for failing to disclose during an audit this summer what they knew about San Francisco-based Ecotality's financial troubles and the possibility that the firm might not meet the terms of its taxpayer funding.  The company received $100 million in aid from the 2009 stimulus.

U.S. sells $50 million green-tech loan at sharp discount.  The U.S. Department of Energy recovered only about one-sixth of its $50 million green-technology loan to Vehicle Production Group LLC, a maker of wheelchair-accessible vans now under new ownership.

Obama's Middle-Class 'Mission Accomplished'.  Obama's idea of a "durable industry" seems to be solar companies like Solyndra and electric car suppliers like A123 Systems.  Both of these "durable" companies filed for bankruptcy after obtaining generous loans from the Obama administration.  Taxpayer money that would otherwise have been invested to create good jobs in the private sector was squandered so the president could pretend he was a green energy pioneer.  In reality, he has never been a pioneer at anything.  He is an old-fashioned radical who still harbors the adolescent fantasy of a Marxist utopia.

State Dept. to Spend $450K for Green Jobs — in Morocco.  The State Department through its Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs plans to spend $450,000 to create green jobs in Morocco.  "Morocco has set the goal to become one of the world's largest sustainable economies by 2020, with an emphasis on creating green jobs in:  renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, environmental and natural resource management, and improvement in environmental technologies," the grant announcement said.

Going Green Fails Yet Again: Siemens CEO Loses His Job.  The CEO of Siemens AG, the German manufacturing giant, has been sent packing.  Seems the board had it with his stewardship.  Instead of making solid gains, he took the company down a green energy hole.

Green Jobs: Surely You're Joking, Mr. President.  In a series of green jobs reports — which was mercifully ended by sequestration after only two reports — the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published tables that provide mirth beyond measure in the form of comical comparisons. [...] The BLS found 33 times as many green jobs in the septic tank and portable toilet servicing industry as in solar electricity utilities.  The BLS determined that there were more green jobs collecting trash (not processing but simply collecting) than in either architectural services or engineering services.

Obama's Green Jobs Promise: 355 Jobs and Counting.  [Scroll down]  Congressional Research Services expert, Dr. Molly Sherlock, deflected direct questions regarding the total jobs created by the 1603 program. [...] According to the Washington Free Beacon, Rep. Cory Gardner (R-CO) pressed on:  "I just want to know how many jobs were created" Sherlock admitted:  355 jobs created a year, for $10 billion — which comes out to about $28 million per job.  These two programs have created a combined total of 2733 jobs (a recent Bloomberg Business Week tally of all green jobs through any program cites a total of 28,854 jobs) and are spending an approximate average of $9.1 million per job.

The Green Job Myth.  President Obama spent $90 billion of his stimulus package on green energy projects, but according to the Labor Department, just 9,245 people landed new jobs in the "green energy" industry by the end of the third quarter of last year, well short of the 200,000 jobs that President Obama told the American people would be generated each year.

Fleming Amendment Ends Another Taxpayer Bailout.  The Obama 2009 stimulus bill cost taxpayers about $830 billion, and much of it was wasted on growing government and administration giveaways, like a $3.25 billion loan program that put taxpayers on the hook for failed green energy projects.  A company could take a government loan and walk away from a project without paying taxpayers back, even if the company remained in business.

Global Warming: There's Nothing To Fight Against.  The junkyard of failed green energy efforts is stacked high with the carcasses of Solyndra, A123 Systems Inc., Ener1, Abound Solar, Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt and AES subsidiary Eastern Energy, to name some of the many defeats.  Making the losses sting even more is the fact there has been no reason to hurry the development of green energy.  The feared warming predicted by models simply hasn't materialized.

Obama Launches New Global Warming Video as Phony "Consensus" Crumbles.  [Scroll down]  Spain has already shown us the destruction that can be wrought by the kind of government-mandated "green jobs" President Obama is proposing. [...]
  •   For every 1 green job financed by Spanish taxpayers, 2.2 jobs were lost as an opportunity cost.
  •   Only 1 out of 10 green job contracts were in maintenance and operation of already installed plants, and most of the rest of the working positions are only sustainable in an expansive environment related to high subsidies.
  •   Since 2000, Spain has committed €571,138 ($753,778) per each "green job,"
  •   Those programs resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,500 jobs.
  •   Each "green" megawatt installed on average destroyed 5.39 jobs elsewhere in the economy, and in the case of solar photovoltaics, the number reaches 8.99 jobs per megawatt hour installed.

Whatever Happened to "Green Jobs"?  If you watched President Obama's major speech on climate change, you may have noticed a recurrent phrase:  "our children."  The president said the word "children" fifteen separate times in the speech. [...] When you stop and think about it for a minute, the messaging change here is pretty extraordinary.  After all, four years ago the administration's central talking point on climate change did not mention climate change.  Rather, the idea was that greening our economy would confer a major benefit in the form of a profusion of green jobs.

Feeding The Masses On Unicorn Ribs.  Many liberals want green jobs to exist so badly that they don't fully grasp how otherworldly and ineffectual this advocacy makes the President look to unemployed meat packers and truck drivers.

Green jobs? Wot green jobs?  [Scroll down]  Yep, it seems like there's one rule for the political class and its cronies — and another one for the rest of us.  If, say, you're Sir Reginald Sheffield Bt the father-in-law of the British prime minister you can make getting on for a £1000 a week from the wind farms on your estates; if you're the wife of the deputy prime minister Nick Clegg you can make hundreds of thousands of pounds as a legal adviser to the Spanish wind farm company whose unsightly bat-chomping eco-crucifixes are going to be wrecking the British countryside.

The data is in: more Green jobs means less real ones.  Might as well bury bottles of money I say.  More jobs.  Less cost.  No infrasound, and no dead bats.  Each green job in Britain costs £100,000 (and 3.7 other jobs):  The Telegraph points out how expensive it is to support a wind-industry job.  My plan to bury bottles with £50,000 apiece in them could halve the cost and employ just as many people.

The Green Jobs Fairy Tale.  Environmentalists love to talk about green jobs.  If only society would follow their advice, we'd apparently be swimming in green employment opportunities. [...] You see the problem, of course.  Welders and sheet metal workers are the sort of skilled tradespeople that most societies could use more of.  But by what flourish of what magic wand have those jobs suddenly become green?  If construction work is now classified as a green job, it becomes distressingly obvious that little new employment has actually been created.  This is an accounting trick, nothing more — an example of juvenile, wishful thinking at its most breathtaking.

True cost of Britain's wind farm industry revealed.  A new analysis of government and industry figures shows that wind turbine owners received £1.2 billion in the form of a consumer subsidy, paid by a supplement on electricity bills last year.  They employed 12,000 people, to produce an effective £100,000 subsidy on each job.  The disclosure is potentially embarrassing for the wind industry, which claims it is an economically dynamic sector that creates jobs.  It was described by critics as proof the sector was not economically viable, with one calling it evidence of "soft jobs" that depended on the taxpayer.

The Department of Energy Committed $11 Million Per Job.  Unlike in 2008, when Barack Obama pledged to create 5 million jobs over 10 years by directing taxpayer funds toward renewable energy projects, there were no press conferences or stump speeches.  But the data are nonetheless revealing:  for the over $26 billion committed since 2009, DOE Section 1703 and 1705 loan guarantees have created only 2,298 permanent jobs — that's $11.45 million per job.

The President's Ruinous Energy Policy: Once More with Feeling.  The sad irony is that this administration has practically doubled the Department of Energy's budget (including a supplemental $38 billion from the 2009 stimulus bill) but that much of that revenue has been squandered on failed green energy projects.  The cost of each one of the president's green energy jobs has been estimated at $23 million per permanent employee.

Second Obama Green Venture in Weeks Folds after Getting Millions.  Another one of President Obama's brilliant clean-energy ventures has collapsed after taking tens of millions of dollars from American taxpayers, in this case to develop a special wheelchair-accessible "green" van.  The news comes just weeks after a separate company that got nearly $200 million from the government to develop hybrid vehicles folded.

Green energy triumph: $11,000,000.00 spent per job created.  "Without much fanfare, the Department of Energy (DOE) recently updated the list of loan guarantee projects on its website," the Institute for Energy Research noticed on Wednesday.  "Unlike in 2008, when Barack Obama pledged to create 5 million jobs over 10 years by directing taxpayer funds toward renewable energy projects, there were no press conferences or stump speeches."  Uh-oh.  Why weren't there any celebrations?  President Obama loves a good celebration. [...] Maybe it's because the IER divided the $26 billion spent on "green jobs" by the Energy Department since 2009, divided it by the 2,298 permanent jobs created, and came up with a cost of $11.45 million per job.

Get Uncle Sam out of the green startup loan business.  Meet the Solyndra of the electric car industry:  Fisker Automotive.  In 2009, the company was awarded a $529 million loan through the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program.  It is in bankruptcy, and has now fired 75 percent of its workforce.  The reality, however failed to meet this goal.  It did produce — at least until last year — the Karma sedan, a $104,000 plug-in electric hybrid car.  But the car wasn't just exclusive and expensive, it didn't even work.

Obama's crony capitalism posts more pitiful results.  It's more than a little disheartening when the chief executive officer of one of America's most storied Fortune 500 corporations is "comfortable" with the fact that his company created a mere 10 jobs with a $25 million grant under President Obama's economic stimulus program in 2010.  The CEO in question is Honeywell's David Cote, and the stimulus grant involved came from the Department of Energy to advance Obama's green energy agenda.

Terry McAuliffe's Solyndra.  Turn over any green-energy rock, and wiggling underneath will be the usual creepy mix of political favoritism and taxpayer-funded handouts. [...] GreenTech is the latest proof (after Solyndra, Fisker, A123 and others) that the political class is adept at hooking up cronies and investors with taxpayer dollars.  But creating jobs?  No can do.

The BLS Green Jobs Count.  On March 22, 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) issued a news release to report the results of their green jobs count. [...] According to the BLS, there are 400 green jobs in the solar utility industry.  So, if this number is used to support subsidies to solar power, we would have to conclude that the more than three decades of support for solar power has generated about one job per month in the solar utility industry. [...] Adding all the green jobs from solar to those in the wind, biomass, and other renewable power utilities (excluding hydroelectric) gives a total of 4,700 green jobs.  This is less than one-seventh the number of green jobs in the nuclear power industry (35,800).

Garbage Collecting a Green Job? According to Government, Yes!  [T]he BLS definition of green jobs is so bizarre that the total counts are meaningless.  For instance, according to the BLS, the septic-tank and portable-toilet servicing industry has nearly three times as many green jobs as are in the solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass power utilities combined.  Not only that, but the lead appears to be widening.

BLS Releases Another Phony 'Green Jobs' Report.  The second annual Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report on "Employment in Green Goods and Services," released Tuesday, will be the last, allegedly a casualty of the same sequestration that claimed the White House tours and may doom the Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn.  That is probably a good thing, for if it were published as a book, it would deserve a place at the top of the New York Times best-seller fiction list.

The Countless Shades of Green Jobs.  Green jobs — or, as our president calls them, the "jobs of the future" — have been notoriously tough to define and count.  The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics recently did it, though, and now it's the result that's notorious.  Facing an admittedly difficult project, the BLS created a definition that is so broad as to make it a meaningless measure of the green economy.  Here's a sneak preview:  There are 33 times as many green jobs in the septic tank and portable toilet servicing industry as there are in solar electricity utilities.

California's Green Jobs: Where Did They Go?  Green jobs were supposed to be the next big thing.  On the campaign trail, President Obama promised to create 5 million new green-collar jobs.  But where the rest of the nation has rejected all or most of these proposals, California has embraced them all.  Unfortunately, it hasn't turned out well, says Conn Carroll in the Washington Examiner.

Jobs of the Future?  [Scroll down]  President Obama refers to green jobs as "jobs of the future."  If so, some comparisons in the BLS green jobs report show a future that looks pretty old.  Engineering services (100,847 green jobs) and architectural services (71,891 green jobs) each has fewer green jobs than used merchandise stores (106,865), waste collection (116,293), and school and employee bus transportation (160,896).  Using the BLS metric, Obama's "jobs of the future" are more likely to be found in trash collection, the Salvation Army, and driving school buses than in engineering and architectural services.

Obama to call for $2 billion green energy fund.  President Obama in Illinois Friday will call for the creation of a $2 billion Energy Security Trust, which would take government royalties from offshore oil and gas leasing and use the money for research in green-energy technologies. [...] The initiative comes as Republicans pressure Obama to approve construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, a project that would carry oil from Canada to refineries in Texas.  The president has delayed construction of the pipeline because of environmental concerns.

Obama Must Drop Green For Real Energy.  Electricity from natural gas, of which America has a 200-year supply, is less expensive than electricity produced from alternative fuels.  The U.S. Energy Information Administration has estimated that the average levelized cost for natural gas-fired plants entering service in 2017 is $66 per megawatt hour, compared to $153 per megawatt hour for solar-powered plants, $96 per megawatt hour for wind power, and $115 per megawatt hour for biomass.  The bottom line:  households have far higher electricity bills using alternative energy than natural gas.

Seven Myths About Green Jobs.  [This] is a summary of a larger study analyzing green jobs claims made by various special interest groups.  The authors find that the claims are based on myths.  Fundamental questions about what is at stake in this massive program need to be addressed before billions in additional deficit spending can be justified.  The authors discuss the economic defects in the green jobs proposals and show that not only is the price tag of the programs unjustified, but that the costly implications to society could be even greater.

Golden State's green jobs bust.  President Obama, of course, has completely failed to deliver on this promise of 5 million new green-collar jobs.  The entire U.S. economy has created only 1.2 million jobs since Obama was sworn into office, many of them in the fossil fuel extraction, production and distribution sector.  But in Obama's defense, most of his green jobs agenda was killed.  Cap-and-trade and renewable electricity mandates never made it through Congress.  High-speed rail was killed off by governors in Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin.  But where the rest of the nation has rejected all or most of these proposals, California has embraced them all.

Controversial green jobs program to get axed in sequester.  A controversial Bureau of Labor Statistics program that tracks U.S. green jobs will get the axe, according to Bloomberg News, because of the automatic budget cuts, called the sequester, which are set to take effect today if lawmakers can't reach an alternative agreement.  Bloomberg reports that a Feb. 26 email sent to Labor Department employees said a clean-energy survey would be one of three data reports cut due to sequestration, according to Bloomberg's anonymous source.

The Logic of Liberalism.  Green energy solutions have become a centerpiece of the current administration.  Hundreds of millions have been poured into green energy programs, many without a single measurable result.  Yet, the administration is convinced of the importance of green energy and is committed to further investment in this venue.

DOE confirms LG Chem battery plant workers were paid not to make Chevy Volt batteries.  After a big announcement in 2010 that the plant would open and hire over 400 people, the first batteries were supposed to start being made in 2012.  Unfortunately, the plant has been sitting idle even though the company received $142 million in federal funds and was granted $175 million in tax breaks.  Only half of the 400 job have been filled, and those workers were paid about $842,000 to do other things in late 2012, including watching movies and playing board, card and video games.

Obama still chasing 'green jobs' will-o'-the-wisp.  It's one thing to say we have to throw a lot of money at solving global warming to save the planet.  It's quite another to pretend that there is a "green economy" just waiting to happen, filled with hundreds of thousands or even millions of good jobs, as Obama has often promised.  The new "green energy economy" that Obama has repeatedly spoken of — a future of lower ocean levels in which Americans work at good-paying jobs manufacturing windmills and solar panels — has always been among the most optimistic features of his vision for America.  But given that it is an economically impossible pipe dream, it is also one of the biggest flops of his presidency.

Tracking President Obama's Green-Energy Failures, the List.  Despite eliminating AES Energy (which I am still not sure of) from my list and adding ReVolt Technology, the numbers remain the same:  23 bankrupt, 29 troubled, equals a new "Obama green-energy failure" list total of 52.  While billions of "green-energy taxpayer money is gone, and we know that the majority of the loans (90 percent) were funneled to Obama and high-ranking Democrat cronies, the "troubled list is a moving target."

Federally Funded Chevy Volt Battery Plant Paid Workers to Play, Not Make Batteries.  It was supposed to be the center of a resurgent domestic lithium ion battery industry.  A shiny new factory in Holland, Michigan, that by the end of 2013 would produce enough energy cells to power 60,000 electric or hybrid electric cars — and the Chevy Volt would be its highest-profile customer.  Instead, after spending $142 million of a $151 million federal Recovery Act grant to set up the factory, LG Chem Michigan has yet to produce a single battery cell that can be used in an electric car sold to the public.  It gets worse.  Two of five planned production lines remain unfinished.  And rather than the 440 jobs the plant was supposed to create, less than half exist today.

No Batteries, Just Playtime: Another $150M Strike for Green-Tech Stimulus.  In February 2010, LG Chem Michigan Inc., a subsidiary of the Korean corporation, was awarded more than $150 million in Recovery Act funding to help construct a $304 million manufacturing plant in Holland, Mich., for lithium-ion polymer batteries to be used in electric cars.  The goal was to manufacture enough electric-car batteries to equip 60,000 vehicles annually by the end of this year. [...] While employees were goofing off, the plant hadn't even reached the capability to manufacture batteries beyond test cells that couldn't be sold to the public. [...] Additionally, a project that was supposed to create more than 440 jobs didn't even reach half that goal.

Investing in Foreign Countries.  The House Energy and Commerce Committee released a report Thursday [1/17/2013] that shows much of the money in a Department of Energy renewable-energy grant program has gone to foreign companies and has failed to produce many jobs.  "American Taxpayer Investment, Foreign Corporation Benefit" examined the grants the Department of Energy has awarded through its "Section 1603" green-energy grant program.  "Nearly one-quarter of this federal grant funding went to the U.S. operations of a handful of large European and Asian renewable energy corporations," the report said.

Ex-Im Bank Funds Green Jobs Overseas.  The U.S. Export-Import Bank recently steered hundreds of millions of dollars in federal loans to Spanish green energy conglomerate Abengoa, which happens to share an advisory board member with the bank.  The Ex-Im Bank approved a $78.6 million direct loan to Spain-based Abengoa in December.  It also approved a $73.6 million direct loan to a wind farm in Uruguay, which is owned by Abengoa.

Will Fisker Be Sold to the Chinese Now Too?  Fisker Automotive finally received a good review for the only model it has produced — the highly subsidized, widely panned and sometimes burned extended-range electric Karma — from automobile aficionado Jay Leno.  But that didn't prevent the recipient of $193 million out of President Obama's green stimulus from laying off another 40 workers.

Is the wind industry entering panic mode?  The wind lobby is working like their livelihoods depend on it — which is mainly because, they do — to convince Congress to extend the production tax credit, set to expire at the start of the new year, that has diverted taxpayer money their way for decades now. Without the guarantee of continued federal assistance, the wind industry is already starting to bleed jobs [...]

Green Graveyard: 19 Taxpayer-Funded Failures.  While there's speculation over which federally supported green energy company may be the next to declare bankruptcy, plenty have already gone belly up.  In one of the most extensive compilations to date, Heritage has identified 19 bankrupt green energy companies — unable to make it even with the $2.6 billion in financial assistance and incentives the government promised.

Campaigning at a diesel engine factory, Obama made no mention 'green energy' or 'green jobs'.  What happened to the green President?  In the past, Obama traveled to Michigan to celebrate projects such as the Chevy Volt, green energy and green manufacturing jobs, but on Monday [12/10/2012] he was in the state campaigning for diesel engines for use in heavy trucks.

Bankrupt Obama-stimulus recipient goes to the highest bidder, the highest bidder being China.  The problem here is that in the case of A123 Systems, a manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries for electric cards, the Obama administration spoon-fed hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money into what they assured us was a guaranteed-successful endeavor at ushering in the glorious green-energy revolution and leading us down the path of ostensibly necessary energy independence.

So, how's your green energy stock doing?  RENIXX® World, the Renewable Energy Industrial Index of the world's top green energy companies, hit an all-time low below 146 on November 21, down more than 90 percent from the December 2007 peak.  The RENIXX index was established in 2006.  It's composed of the world's 30 largest renewable energy companies with more than 50 percent of revenues coming from wind, solar, biofuel, or geothermal energy, or the hydropower or fuel cell sector.

China bids today on yet another failed Obama energy loan recipient.  You won't hear much about it elsewhere today.  But from some downtown Chicago law offices will come the distinct sound of one more nail being driven into the coffin of Barack Obama's green energy giveaway loans.  A123 Systems will be auctioned off.  It's a Michigan lithium ion battery maker which declared bankruptcy back in October, the same day it cashed another $1 million check from the crack Obama investment team.

Battery maker that received stimulus money could be sold to Chinese company.  A bankrupt battery manufacturer that was a cornerstone of President Obama's effort to make the United States a global leader in clean-energy technology could end up in the hands of a Chinese company when it goes on the auction block Thursday [12/6/2012].

Green Jobs Go 0-for-4.  [Scroll down]  The single largest green job category is "janitors and cleaners, except maids and housekeeping cleaners," which had 56,700 green jobs.  This is nearly 10 times as many green jobs as in "civil engineers," which has the highest number of green jobs in the "architecture and engineering occupations" super category.

Did the U.S. Constitution Promise a Chicken in Every Pot?  [Scroll down]  So every time the liberals like Obama try to regulate an industry, they intentionally try to stop the flow of commerce.  Obama thought he could make Green energy rise from the oceans and eliminate oil and coal and natural gas.  Obama thought he could make an electric car that would run on hot air rather than coal, natural gas, and nuclear.  Cap and trade is a tax on commerce.  Obama and the commies want to hinder U.S. Commerce in the name of carbon emissions.

Visit to Boomtown.  For now, the 5 million "green-collar jobs" that Obama promised have not materialized, and the million electric cars he vowed to put on the roads are rarely seen.  What's going to spark our economic recovery is traditional energy — that is, the proven energy sources that transformed America into an industrial powerhouse.

Emails Link White House to Another Green Flop.  Just-revealed emails confirm that the Obama administration, and the president himself, have misled Americans about the White House's role in fast-tracking a $400 million "stimulus" loan guarantee to a politically-connected "green energy" firm.  If you followed the Solyndra saga, this will come as no surprise to you — nor will the fact that Obama has been spreading misinformation about his White House's culpability in the matter.

Quarter-billion-dollar stimulus grant creates just 400 jobs.  Battery maker A123 Systems vowed thousands of new jobs when it received a nearly quarter-billion-dollar stimulus grant in late 2009, but federal job-tracking figures show only a few hundred positions were created before the company joined a growing list of federally backed energy businesses that ended in bankruptcy.

Report finds Labor Department's green jobs program failing.  The news media loves the Democrats and they are constantly making fun of Republicans for doubting evolution and global warming.  I submit to you that believe in green jobs programs is the scientific equivalent of flat-Earthism.  And I have the numbers to prove it.  They have the blind faith and the insults.  We have the evidence.

Obama's green-energy jobs failure rate.  Get ready for more of our tax dollars to be frivolously thrown at the "green energy" and the "jobs of the future."

Obama's green-jobs argument still bearing little-to-no resemblance to reality.  In an unaired bit of his recent 60 Minutes interview, President Obama continued to defend his at-this-point-entirely-indefensible policies aimed at forcibly remaking America's economy into the green utopia of environmentalists' most romantical visions.

Audit: Green jobs stimulus program wastes cash.  The government earmarked more than $400 million for green jobs training programs, and $328.5 million has been spent so far.  About half were already working in the energy sector and wanted retraining, and half were potential new energy workers.  Of those workers who already had energy-sector jobs, the auditors said they were retrained, even though they didn't need it.  "We found no evidence that the incumbent workers in our sample required services or training to keep their job or obtain a new one," the investigators said in their report.

ReVolt Technology, backed by Oregon, Portland tax money, heads for bankruptcy.  Another publicly subsidized green company is going under, this one — called ReVolt Technology — backed in Portland by city and state taxpayers.  Losses on ReVolt are tiny compared to those at Solyndra Inc., the notorious California solar company that tanked after receiving a $535 million federal loan guarantee.  Portland and the state of Oregon had committed $6.8 million to ReVolt, which also landed a $5 million federal grant.

Volt no jolt: LG Chem employees idle.  Workers at LG Chem, a $300 million lithium-ion battery plant heavily funded by taxpayers, tell [WOOD-TV] that they have so little work to do that they spend hours playing cards and board games, reading magazines or watching movies.  They say it's been going on for months.

Plant that Received $150m Stimulus Cash Hasn't Produced a Single Battery.  A local Michigan television station reports that workers at LG Chem, a lithium-ion battery plant that received over $150 million stimulus dollars, have so little to do that they spend their days playing cards and board games, reading magazines and watching movies.  And they have yet to make a single battery.

President Obama's Taxpayer-Backed Green Energy Failures.  The government's picking winners and losers in the energy market has cost taxpayers billions of dollars, and the rate of failure, cronyism, and corruption at the companies receiving the subsidies is substantial.  The fact that some companies are not under financial duress does not make the policy a success.  It simply means that our taxpayer dollars subsidized companies that would've found the financial support in the private market.

Electric Car Crash.  Another big green Administration favorite went belly-up on Tuesday [10/16/2012] with the Chapter 11 filing by battery-maker A123 Systems Inc.  Massachusetts-based A123 is — or was — part of President Obama's grand design to build a U.S. electric-car industry more or less from scratch.  The company was founded by entrepreneurs in 2001 to make lithium ion phosphate batteries and attracted private investment from the likes of Sequoia Capital and GE.  Then Washington picked up the green energy fad.

Foreign Wind Company Laying Off 800 Workers, Despite $50 Million 'Investment' By Taxpayers.  Another day, another failed government funded green energy project.  This one, Vestas, isn't even an American company.

Republicans Seize on Bankruptcy of Battery Maker That Received $249M in Federal Loan Guarantees.  The bankruptcy filing Tuesday [10/16/2012] of an electric car battery maker that received $249 million in federal loan guarantees and that President Obama had touted as a poster child for green-energy jobs has given fresh fodder to Republicans and presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who have attacked Obama's green-energy initiatives as a waste of taxpayer funds, yielding few new jobs.

Obama's Crony Empire Crumbles.  As the curtain rises on the second presidential debate, President Barack Obama's crony capitalist empire is crumbling.  First, markets received word that troubled lithium ion battery manufacturer A 123 — which received the enthusiastic endorsement of President Obama and Democrats on Capitol Hill, as well as $249 million in taxpayer money — had filed for bankruptcy.

Another Green Company Bites the Dust.  What does (or did) A123 do?  It "makes rechargeable lithium-ion batteries for electric cars."

A123 Files For Bankruptcy; Sells Auto Assets To Johnson Controls.  The company has been hurt by the slow development of the electric car market.  Don't be surprised to see this turn into a Solyndra-style political football; A123 had received $249 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Electric Car Battery Maker A123 Systems Files Bankruptcy.  A123 Systems Inc. (AONE), the electric car battery maker that received a $249 million federal grant, filed for bankruptcy protection after failing to make a debt payment that was due yesterday [10/15/2012].

$1.3 billion for 288 jobs: The failure of government-subsidized renewable energy.  Despite the lofty promises, these "green jobs" are few and far between, even after massive federal subsidies.  Since 2009, the federal government has funneled more than $1.3 billion into geothermal, solar and wind projects in Nevada.  However, these projects have led — or are projected to lead — to just 288 permanent, full-time jobs.  That's an initial cost of over $4.6 million per job.

Take Your Pick: Trendy Green Jobs, or Real Jobs?  "Green jobs" are all the rage among Democrats these days. [...] But what are green jobs?  The various definitions are confusing and contradictory.  Just as "green" has become a vogue label, meant to signify a commitment to the environment (or to combating global warming), so the Labor Department sometimes slaps a "green" label on regular old jobs.

Danish Wind Turbine Company That Received Over $50 Million In Stimulus Lays Off 800 Workers.  A Danish wind turbine company whose subsidiaries received over $50 million in U.S. stimulus dollars announced on Friday [10/12/2012] it has cut more than 800 jobs in the United States and Canada this year and may be forced to lay off another 800 employees in North America.  This is yet another green energy company that received wasteful stimulus funds and does not even have anything to show for it.

Plant that got $150M in taxpayer money to make Volt batteries furloughs workers.  President Obama touted it in 2010 as evidence "manufacturing jobs are coming back to the United States," but two years later, a Michigan hybrid battery plant built with $150 million in taxpayer funds is putting workers on furlough before a single battery has been produced.

Bankrupt green loan loser Abound Solar now under investigation in Colorado.  If it's a day that ends in "y," it's a day of trouble for an Obama green loan recipient somewhere in America.  Like Mitt Romney said during the debate last week, the crony-in-chief doesn't just pick winners and losers, he picks the losers.

Another Spectacular Green Failure.  Greens have an odd knack for developing useless and expensive government policies.  Ethanol, ballyhooed as a way to reduce greenhouse gasses, raises food prices for the poor and, in the U.S., actually increases greenhouse gas emissions at great cost.  Costly programs to create "green jobs" seem to produce more scandals than jobs.  And now we have a subsidy program for electric cars that costs money but otherwise gets nothing done.

Chevy Volt Battery Plant Floundering Despite $151M from Obama.  Another in a long list of Obama-touted and tax-supported "green energy" companies is on the verge of going out of business, this time in Michigan.

Obama in the Buff.  [President Obama's] promises to create 5 million green energy jobs have come to nothing, as has his pledge to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, but who in the national media is pointing that out?

Wind turbine maker Vestas announces 1,400 job cuts.  Vestas Wind Systems A/S officials said Thursday [8/23/2012] the company would cut 1,400 jobs, on top of 2,300 in layoffs announced earlier this year.  According to a Wall Street Journal report, the move would bring the Denmark-based company's total workforce to about 19,000 by year-end, down from an earlier estimate of 20,400.  It's unclear how the cuts will affect Vestas' North American headquarters in Portland.

Chaffetz seeks data on use of stimulus cash for job ads.  Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican and a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, plans to push Obama administration officials for more information on why the Labor Department spent a half-million dollars in federal stimulus money for more than 100 commercials that ran on MSNBC.  The ads ran on the "Rachel Maddow Show" and "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" in 2009, but government reports showed the contract created no jobs.  The money was paid out through a public relations firm to raise awareness about "green training" efforts through the Job Corps program.

Why green energy startups are now 'toxic'.  The boom in natural gas has hurt the competitiveness of alternative energy.  And proposed budget cuts would force the government to dial back support of wind farms, solar panel manufacturers, ethanol producers and makers of alternative fuel cars.  In response, investors say they won't lend money to green energy companies, especially startups, because they haven't proven they can be profitable on their own.

Electric car boom in Ind. city goes bust.  Elkhart, Indiana lost jobs faster than any other city in the country in 2009.  Both Democrats and Republicans promised to re-energize manufacturing in the city, backing a new electric car plant.  But as CBS News investigated, instead of a boom, things went bust.  With unemployment peaking above 20 percent, Elkhart, Indiana was at the white-hot center of the economic meltdown, and a natural launch point for President Obama's electric vehicle initiative.

Green energy firm sacks two-thirds of American workforce days after receiving $32 million government loan.
Gone with the Wind.  Just days after the Export-Import Bank approved a multi-million dollar federal loan guarantee to benefit a mostly foreign-based wind-energy outfit, the company pink-slipped more than 200 American workers.  The Export-Import Bank, a federal agency that promotes and finances sales of U.S. exports to foreign buyers, approved a $32 million loan guarantee on Aug. 2 for a Brazilian firm to purchase wind turbines from LM Wind Power.  According to its website, LM Wind Power is headquartered in Denmark.

Wind-energy tax credits fund bird murder.  If an energy option makes sense — technically, economically and environmentally — it should be implemented.  If it flunks, it should be scrapped.  Industrial wind energy fails every test.  It requires perpetual subsidies to survive.  By taking tax revenues from productive sectors of the economy to provide expensive, unreliable electricity, it kills two to four jobs for every "green" job it creates.

Wind Energy Jobs: Mysterious Numbers from AWEA.  The numero uno goal of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) is extending the Production Tax Credit (PTC) beyond its current expiration date of December 31, 2012.  Documents available on the trade group's website show that about $4 million of AWEA's 2012 budget ($30 million) was directed toward PTC lobbying.  With job growth the top political issue in this election season, AWEA's strategic plan calls for rebranding of the wind industry as an economic engine that will produce steady job growth, particularly in the manufacturing sector.  But therein lies a problem:  the wind industry's own record on job growth lacks credibility.

A List Of Obama's Green Energy Failures.  Here's a list of the companies that this administration was sure would be winners just a year or so ago.
  •   Evergreen Solar — $3M in DoE funds, $58M from the state of Massachusetts;
  •   SpecrtraWatt — $500K;
  •   Solyndra — $535M;
  •   Beacon Power — $43M;
  •   Eastern Energy, an AES subsidiary — $17.1M;
  •   Nevada Geothermal — $98.5M;
  •   SunPower — $1.5B;
  •   First Solar — $3B;
  •   Babcock & Brown — $178M (they're Australian);
  •   Ener1 — $118.5M;
  •   Amonix — $5.9M;
  •   Fisker Automotive — $339M to build cars in Finland;
  •   Abound Solar — $400M;
  •   Solar Trust of America — $2.1B;
  •   A123 Systems — $279M;
  •   Willard & Kelsey Solar Group — $6M
  •   Johnson Controls — $299M;
  •   Schneider Electric — $86M.
What do these companies have in common, other than getting tons of your money?  Well, they're all either in or headed for bankruptcy court.

Another DOE-Sponsored Solar Plant Idles Production.  Another American solar firm is purportedly in financial disarray after receiving millions of dollars in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).  Only a year after it opened, the Amonix solar manufacturing plant located in North Las Vegas has idled production, leaving serious questions about the company's financial viability and whether taxpayers will be burdened with another multi-million-dollar DOE-subsidized boondoggle.

Obama Pledges More Taxpayer Dollars For Green Energy.  Speaking at a July 16 campaign event in Cincinnati, Ohio, President Obama insisted that he does not make the same mistake twice, and that he would remain steadfast in his efforts to subsidize the "green" energy industry.  "I don't know about you, but in my life what I've found, you know, sometimes I do boneheaded things, I make mistakes," Obama conceded.  "I find, when I try something that doesn't work, then I don't try it again.  I don't — you don't go back to doing something that didn't work."  Soon after, the president promised that he would continue to "invest" in alternative-energy technology if he is reelected in November.

Obama's green jobs bust.  Last week's underwhelming jobs report prompted the Obama administration to caution that one should "not read too much" into such numbers.  One can sympathize with the administration's statistical agnosticism.  After all, with a record that includes 41 straight months of 8 percent or worse unemployment, Obama can't credibly claim to have done much to spur job growth.  Nowhere is that failure more resounding than with his signature job-creation program — so-called "green jobs."

Caught in a green crossfire.  President Obama has waged war on fossil fuels for three and a half years — and American consumers and families are caught in the green energy crossfire.  They are getting hit with higher energy prices, dismal employment prospects and a floundering economy, as billions go to unfriendly overseas countries for oil we could produce in the USA, and billions of tax dollars are wasted on subsidy schemes designed to make "green" energy more competitive — by raising the cost of electricity and fossil fuels that really power our economy.

Failure of Serious Energy is [an embarrassment] for Obama and His Chicago Cronies.  Before there was Solyndra, there was Serious Energy.  The company was personally hyped by President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Senator Roland Burris (remember him?) as a "green jobs" company funded by Obama's 2009 stimulus.  Today, Serious Energy is closing factories and laying off workers — and the Federal Trade Commission has found it made false claims about the energy efficiency of its products.

Green Jobs Count: Fewer than Before, Sillier than Ever.  Back in March, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released a study showing our economy had 3.1 million green jobs.  Recently, it issued another green jobs study with a headlining number of 854,700 green jobs.  Don't worry — the economy did not lose 2 million green jobs in three months.  There were not 3.1 million green jobs to begin with.  And there are not 854,700 green jobs now.

Bankrupt Colorado solar firm sticks taxpayers for $68 million, doomed by poor quality.  Despite glowing press clippings in which the CEO of Colorado-based Abound Solar claimed seven months ago that his company was the "anti-Solyndra," the green-energy firm has filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation.  It is terminating all 125 workers at its Loveland, Colo. headquarters, and is blaming China for its failure.

Creating Green Jobs is Like Banning Tractors to Create Farm Jobs.  The Pew Research Center ranks Oregon as the top state for "green jobs" in the country.  Their unemployment rate has been above the national average every month for the last four years.  Number three on the list is California, with a current unemployment rate of 10.9 percent.  Last on the list?  Natural gas rich North Dakota, with a current unemployment rate of 3 percent.

Green company creates three jobs in three years, gets another $80 million from DOE.  Department of Energy officials gave a New Hampshire-based biofuel company access to $80 million for a Michigan project that has already fallen short of job creation expectations, despite receiving another $40 million in state and DOE subsidies.  "In September 2008, Mascoma [Corp.] pledged 70 jobs at the plant by the end of 2012.  On Feb. 29 of this year, Mascoma reported to the MEDC that only three jobs had been created by the grant," the Capitol Confidential (Mich.) reports today.  "The company has been given the full $20 million from the state."

Obama's Green-Jobs Fraud Exposed.  The administration has a most curious way of describing what a green job is, but if you count just the "direct" jobs, it cost taxpayers $9.8 million to create each of those long-term jobs.  Throw in the indirect jobs supporting the direct jobs estimate of 4,600 (we're confused too) and there are 5,510 total jobs (direct and indirect).  Starting with the $9 billion in grants, the result to establish 5,510 jobs averages out to $1.63 million per job.

$9 Billion in 'Stimulus' for Solar, Wind Projects Made 910 Final Jobs — $9.8 Million Per Job.  The Obama administration distributed $9 billion in economic "stimulus" funds to solar and wind projects in 2009-11 that created, as the end result, 910 "direct" jobs — annual operation and maintenance positions — meaning that it cost about $9.8 million to establish each of those long-term jobs.

Obama administration program spent $10B to create 355 jobs per year.  The Obama administration spent $10 billion to create 355 renewable energy jobs per year, according to testimony offered Tuesday [6/19/2012] before Congress by a Congressional Research Services expert.  Asked by Rep. Cory Gardner (R., Colo.) "how many jobs were created" in 2009 and 2010 under the 1603 renewable energy grant program authorized by the Obama administration, a CRS specialist in public finance admitted that $10 billion was spent to create 3,666 construction jobs over a two-year period — and only 355 jobs per year going forward.

Obama the Reactionary.  [Scroll down]  I'm half convinced that Obama himself believed in the miracle of "green jobs."  No sensible engineer pays attention to large-scale solar energy, because the conversion efficiency of sunshine to electricity is dreadful, which is why venture capitalists walk away from it.  It's simple high school physics.  But Obama might believe in miracles; or rather, he might figure it might just work (who knows?), and if it didn't, his big bundlers would still walk away with half a billion dollars in tax money, so it's a win-win for him either way.

We Need Green Money, Not Green Jobs.  The Carter Administration invested $2.1 billion in the Great Plains Coal Gasification Plant to convert coal to gas.  The result?  Zero.  Federal government spending since 1961 on "advanced energy technologies and basic energy science research" totals $187 billion with hardly anything to show.  Poor folks don't need socialism or green jobs.  They need green money.  They'll get more of it being free, going to school, getting married and going to work.

Green energy jobs far short of Obama goal.  President Obama has made much of his commitment to green energy as he launches his re-election bid, but the nascent industry has produced far fewer jobs than the president promised, despite massive, repeated infusions of taxpayer dollars.  Since taking office more than three years ago, Obama has routinely promoted wind, solar and other green energy efforts, touring factories — often the beneficiaries of federal grants — and touting the manufacturers as cutting-edge job producers who are leading America's transition to energy independence.  He had promised in 2008 to help those companies create millions of jobs.

The green energy bubble is bursting fast everywhere.  So the tech bubble burst a decade ago, and the housing bubble five years ago.  The higher education bubble is swelling to the bursting point, but it is the green energy bubble that is bursting loudest at the moment, and as usual environmentalists are slow to see that they're about to get run over by a revival of the hydrocarbon economy.  Those old dinosaurs may have been big lumbering animals, but the nimble fossil fuels they threw off are crushing the so-called green "fuels of the future" beloved of fruit-juice drinkers and vegans everywhere.

First Solar Furlough.  A politically connected, taxpayer-funded solar firm announced a massive round of furloughs on Friday [5/25/2012], just weeks after its chairman told Congress his company was "financially strong."  First Solar, an Arizona-based solar panel manufacturer that received more than $3 billion in federal loan guarantees under President Obama, has furloughed half of the 240-person workforce at its Antelope Valley Solar Ranch One (AVSR1) power plant near Los Angeles.

Obama Is Spending $5.5 Million Per Green Energy Job.  Barack Obama spent $90 billion on Green Energy Jobs creating only 16,100 jobs.  That comes out to $5.5 million per job.

The Greying of Green?  Ener 1, which received a $118 million stimulus grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop lithium storage batteries for electric cars, has filed for bankruptcy protection (Bloomberg Businessweek, February 2, 2012).  This is bad news for the plug-in Chevy Volt, the president's car of choice, which is beset with problems anyway; GM had to suspend production to cut inventory owing to anemic sales (Left Lane Online, March 2, 2012).  Abound Solar, which makes cadmium telluride solar modules to the tune of a $400 million federal loan guarantee, has laid off 300 workers, amounting to 70% of its workforce (New York Post, March 10, 2012).  And now the electric vehicle battery company A123 Systems, beneficiary of $300 million in Obama's Recovery Act funds and $135 million in state tax credits and subsidies, courtesy of Michigan's former Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm, is about to go belly up — another instance, to use Michelle Malkin's term, of a smart grid, crony-inspired "enviro-boodle" (National Review Online, March 30, 2012).

Washington Post: Obama Green Jobs Cost $5 Million Each.  The Washington Post might be a day late and $38 billion short, but it's being honest about Barack Obama's failed green jobs program.  According to the Post, the "$38.6 billion loan guarantee program" has created just "3,545 new, permanent jobs" "after giving out almost half the allocated amount."  For those not doing the math at home, that means more than $5 million per job.  The Post outlined Obama administration promises to "create or save 65,000 jobs" in the green jobs category.  What it left out was that, while campaigning, Obama promised to create 5 million "green" jobs.  He's about 4,996,455 short.

Green Jobs: Help Wanted.  This year-long investigation into President Obama's plan to rescue the economy with green jobs includes a series of exposés:
  •   President Obama called one solar energy company a 'success story.'  But it still survives almost entirely on government subsidies.
  •   A greener light bulb was supposed to create green jobs.  Instead it put hundreds of Americans out of work.
  •   American taxpayers have given billions to makers of electric cars.  So why won't American consumers buy them?
  •   A whistleblower says his college won millions in federal grants to train workers for green jobs that didn't exist.
  •   A Spanish economist says his country conned America into buying into 'Spain's green economy miracle.'  But that miracle was really just a myth.

Taxpayers Reward Executives for Failure as Green Jobs are Slashed.  First Solar, the beneficiary of at least $3 billion in Department of Energy loan guarantees, paid its former CEO $32 million over two years as he stewarded its stock price from $143 to below $100.  Today it sells for less than $21-per-share, hitting a 52-week low last week, and yesterday [4/18/2012] the company announced it would slash global payroll by 2,000 workers in Malaysia, Europe and the U.S.

Keeping nature exactly as is... forever.  Politicians specialize in convincing you that, with their help, you can have your cake and eat it, too.  The idea of a new "green economy" that is both clean and rich with jobs became popular under Bill Clinton's administration, thanks in large part to a compliant media and Vice President Al Gore.  But anyone who understands economics knows that President Obama's green jobs initiative is snake oil.

Green energy girds for dark times as subsidies expire.  A red light is flashing for the green energy business.  After a three-year boom, the outlook for wind, solar and other renewable energy companies has turned sharply negative.  The tax credits, grants, loans and other subsidies that sparked the growth of these technologies are shrinking fast.  It has been called a "subsidy cliff."  The question now is who will fall and who will fly.

Obama is the World's Worst Investor.  Consider Obama's investment in "green jobs".  After three and a half years and almost one hundred billion dollars of "investments", Obama's programs have been able to create only a few thousand jobs, certainly not the 5 million "green jobs" originally promised by the president.  And, many of those few thousand jobs created are actually existing government jobs that have been re-categorized by Team Obama.

Big Losses for Taxpayers as Another Green Company Turns Rotten.  In July of [2009], Beacon received $43 million in guarantees to help fund construction of a 20 megawatt flywheel energy storage plant in Stephentown, New York.  It took just 28 months for Beacon to burn through its government-guaranteed loans and declare bankruptcy.

DOE-backed solar company lays off 2000.  First Solar, a solar energy company that received a $1.46 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, announced today that it will layoff 2,000 workers in the United States and world-wide.

The Answer Really Isn't Blowing in the Wind.  In the natural world, 90 billion goes a long way.  But as we've discovered, a $90-billion investment to subsidize renewable energy sources in the natural world does surprisingly little.  This amount, allocated in 2009's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to subsidize green energy initiatives, has thus far yielded today's bustling "renewable-energy sector" that employs roughly 140,000 Americans.  And even that dismal figure is wildly inflated.

The Editor says...
I'll save you a trip to your calculator.  $90 billion divided by 140,000 jobs equals $642,857 per job.

Obama's "green jobs" have been slow to sprout .  Stretching row upon row into the desert, the Copper Mountain Solar Project not far from Las Vegas provided an impressive backdrop for the president.  Built on public land, the facility is the largest of its kind in the United States.  Its 1 million solar panels provide enough energy to power 17,000 homes.  And it employs just 10 people.

Why isn't anyone talking about the failure of Obama's 'Green Economy?'  This piece by Andy Sullivan at Reuters is remarkable for how it highlights the monumental gap between President Obama's promises about how going green will create hundreds of thousands of jobs and begin to transform the economy, and the actual results in the last 3 years.

Reuters: Those "green-collar jobs" promises have been a bust, huh?  The Obama administration has been reduced now to arguing that its $90 billion expenditure will result in 827,000 "job years" over the course of Obama's term in office.  For those who are counting, that would be 276,000 jobs lasting three years.  Even in "job years," that comes to $108,827 per job-year; in jobs, it comes to $326,481.  And the "job-years" construct carries a heavy subtext of a lack of permanence, too.

Obama's green jobs fantasy.  Obama's green jobs push isn't producing jobs as promised. [...] Read the Reuters story for what was either the Obama administration's naïvité, ignorance, or dishonesty about how they were going to fight unemployment by using the government to fund new green jobs.  They still can't even define what a green job is with various government agencies having different definitions.  But it just isn't turning out that the federal government can pump enough money into such approved industries to make a measurable drop in unemployment.

A dubious green jobs count.  Green jobs or, as our president calls them, the "jobs of the future" have been notoriously tough to define and count.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently did it, though, and now it is the results that are notorious.  Though tasked with an admittedly difficult project, the BLS created a definition of green jobs that is so broad as to make it a meaningless measure of the green economy.  Here's a sneak preview:  There are 33 times as many green jobs in the septic tank and portable toilet servicing industry as in solar electricity utilities.

For Obama, green is the color of money wasted on more Solyndras.  Last week, as President Obama delivered his economic speech deriding the so-called "trickle-down" economic policies that created 16 million jobs under President Reagan, his Energy Department was preparing to announce the next stage of a policy that may never create any.  David Frantz, chief of the DOE's clean energy loan program, informed Congress by letter on Thursday [4/5/2012] that his department will "begin issuing conditional commitments over the next several months" for new loans and loan guarantees to green energy companies.  Why Obama is doubling and tripling down on one of his worst and most embarrassing policy mistakes is anybody's guess.

The Green Jobs Boondoggle.  In early September 2011, the Washington Post reported that the 2009 stimulus plan's $38.6 billion loan-guarantee program targeting green energy companies "has directly created 3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount."  Let's see; $18.8 billion (the actual amount disbursed at the time) divided by 3,545 works out to $5.3 million per job.  We'd have been much better off paying each new worker a couple hundred grand a year just to stay home.

EV firm files for bankruptcy, lays off 50 Oak Park workers.  A Canadian company that electrifies Ford Motor Co.'s Transit Connect is reorganizing under court-protection and filed for bankruptcy in the United States.  British Columbia-based Azure Dynamics, which has offices in Oak Park, has been installing the battery electric powertrain in Ford's Transit Connect since 2010.

Lying About Green Jobs Now.  The BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics], which is also in charge of counting jobs data, uses a methodology to determine a green job that's not based on skill differences but instead that has an apparent benefit to the environment.  This includes mass transit workers because they are providing a service that benefits the environment according to testimony from Hilda Solis who testified before congress last year.  The rationale for this lunacy is that lots of people take the bus and not cars so it's saving the environment.  I would say it's presumptuous to assume everyone on the bus had an option to drive a car.  But the absurdity of all this is you could actually drive a bus running on fossil fuel and still be considered a green worker.

Obama burns a zillion gallons of fuel to escape blame for high gas prices.  [Scroll down]  One of Obama's blame-avoidance campaign stops will be at the Copper Mountain Solar 1 solar-panel facility, which uses a million solar panels to provide energy to 17,000 homes.  Obama will doubtless promote this facility as a great example of our New Sustainable Future.  The next time you hear Obama or his apologists sneer at the 20,000 jobs that would have been created by the Keystone XL pipeline, remember that the Solar 1 facility has... five permanent employees.

The entire Obama presidency, in one anecdote.  So where are the new jobs coming from, at least the good-paying ones?  From the industry Obama wants to replace as much as possible with "clean" energy:  oil and gas.

Top 10 Obama energy blunders.  President Obama made sure the $787 billion stimulus package was stuffed with initiatives meant to create green jobs by the millions.  What the taxpayer got in return was a parade of bankrupt companies, led by Solyndra.  The solar-panel producing company got a $535 million loan guarantee, with the promise that 4,000 jobs would be created, but end up filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year.

Is Abound Solar the Next Solyndra?  Abound Solar makes "next-generation thin-film cadmium telluride solar modules," writes Independence Institute's Amy Oliver.  The company was "recipient of a $400 million Department of Energy loan, just announced it is laying off 70 percent (280 employees) of its Colorado workforce."

Green Energy Debacle: Taxpayer Dollars Into Pockets of Obama Donors.  President Obama and the rest of his Administration remain vigilant in their attempt to convince Americans that "green energy" and "green jobs" are real.  The only reality seen in this Administration's "green jobs" push is the consequence of Big Government intervening into the private markets.  Although these failed renewable energy companies — backed by OUR tax dollars — filed for bankruptcy, it wasn't before they used the Department of Energy's (DOE) cash to fund six-figure bonuses.

Colorado's Own Green Loan Sinkhole.  Meet Loveland-based Abound Solar, the lucky winner of a $400 million federal loan guarantee from the Obama administration.  Earlier this month, the thin-film cadmium telluride solar module-maker announced layoffs of nearly 300 employees (70 percent of its workforce).  In addition, the firm froze plans to build a new factory in Indiana.  Abound says it will ride out bad market conditions and "hopefully" survive until the market recovers.

Another 1,300 laid off after Obama's bailout.  President Obama's rewrite of the history of the American automobile industry this week went unchallenged by the fact-checkers in journalism, proving once again PolitiFact and the rest are unpaid stooges of American liberalism.  On Tuesday, The Won boasted — erroneously — about saving the automobile business.  On Friday, 1,300 workers at GM received layoff notices as there is no market for Chevy Volts, despite government subsidies of $7,500 per car (the average income of a Chevy Volt buyer is $175,000 a year according to GM).

Obama's Green Energy Failures Continue To Abound.  President Obama is the Little Orphan Annie of presidents.  He is always singing that the sun will come out tomorrow and shine on the American economy and his dreams of green energy.  Yet companies such as Solyndra have proved the rule rather than the exception, producing more pink slips than green jobs as solar power and alternative energy continue to be eclipsed by advances in fossil fuel production.  The latest casualty is Abound Solar Manufacturing.  The Longmont, Colorado-based recipient of a $400 million federal loan guarantee to expand solar panel production said Tuesday [2/28/2012] it is laying off 280 workers and delaying a new factory in Indiana.

'Green' Jobs Estimates Cost Taxpayers Millions.  Green jobs generally are thought of as jobs associated with products and services that use renewable energy resources, reduce pollution, or conserve natural resources.  But as Rick Clayton, manager of the BLS green jobs project, noted in an October 2010 presentation, there is "no widely accepted definition" of a green job.

Sapphire in the Rough:
$100M in federal money; 36 jobs created.  The federal government awarded Sapphire Energy, a green energy concern, more than $100 million for a project that is behind schedule, has only created a fraction of its expected jobs, and is, according to some experts, at least a decade away from creating a viable product.  Founded in 2007, Sapphire is working to develop algal biofuel — a replacement to crude oil made from algae and able to be refined into gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel.

Green company gets $390M subsidies, lays off 125.  A123 Systems, an electric car battery company once touted as a stimulus "success story" by former Gov. Jennifer Granhom, D-Mich., has laid off 125 employees since receiving $390 million in government subsidies — but is still handing out big pay raises to company executives.  "[T]he company has laid off 125 employees and had a net loss of $172 million through the first three quarters of 2011," the Mackinac Center for Public Policy notes, observing that the company's primary customer, Fisker Automotive, is also struggling financially.

The Endless Party of the Party-Master-in-Chief.  The federal government, meanwhile, parties on at the Green Energy Bash, dumping millions of dollars into Solyndra and its ilk, while increasing subsidies on a short-range electric car that nobody wants and that apparently bursts into flames in certain situations.  Sure, a study in Spain discovered that for every "Green" job created, two non-green jobs were lost, but who cares?  It's a party!  At a party, you can ignore reality, close yourself off to the outside world, and pretend your worries away.

Top 10 reasons to elect anybody but Obama.  [#3]  The Republican candidates are all, to varying degrees, free-market capitalists.  Not so with the current White House occupant, who favors picking winners and losers out of "fairness" or "to help the environment."  So we sink billions into Solyndra and other bankrupt companies in the Utopian hope that creating green jobs will save the planet.  As Chevy Volt sales indicate, consumer engineering is best to be left to the marketplace.

Taxpayers Take Hit as Solar Industry Implodes.  In a year where Solyndra became the face of the solar industry's chronic failures, even the holiday season could not prevent one last flurry of layoffs in 2011.  The Mountain Enterprise (based in Frazier Park, Calif.) reported over the weekend that First Solar, Inc. — which the media sometimes identifies as the largest solar company in the world — laid off half its employees on Friday [12/30/2012] at its Antelope Valley Solar Ranch One project.

Time to redefine green jobs in community context.  To this day, I am bemused at how anyone can look at job creation and land use in isolation, without looking at the overall societal impact of an action that is supported because it will "create jobs."  This is nowhere as evident as in the dialogue about how the construction of industrial wind facilities will create green jobs.

Vestas Cuts 2,335 Jobs With More at Risk This Year in U.S..  Vestas Wind Systems A/S (VWS), the world's biggest wind turbine maker, said it will halt production at one factory and cut 2,335 jobs, or 10 percent of its staff, to become more competitive with Chinese suppliers.  The changes are aimed at saving more than 150 million euros ($191 million) by the end of 2012, the company based in Aarhus, Denmark, said today in a statement.  Vestas said another 1,600 jobs in the U.S. are at risk as a tax credit supporting the industry expires at year-end.

Clean green fraud.  The spectacular failure of Solyndra opened a lot of eyes.  Yet the bankrupt solar panel manufacturer is far from the only fly-by-night outfit to take advantage of the current "green energy" fad.  No program is more ripe for abuse than the renewable fuel standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  Last week, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, Michigan Republican, and Energy and Power Subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield, Kentucky Republican, opened their own investigation into the fraudulent outfits that sell tradeable biodiesel fuel credits to legitimate companies that need to meet the arbitrary mandates established by the EPA and Congress.

Obama's Amazing Energy Spin Machine.  The bankruptcy of Ener1, a "green energy" firm that got a $118 million stimulus grant, has brought the Obama administration's commitment to sinking billions of dollars into alternative energy boondoggles back into the spotlight.  Unfortunately, President Obama remains committed to continuing down this wasteful path, as his statements about energy in his recent State of the Union Address made clear.  While the president spent more time on the topic than any other policy area, he distorted the facts, misrepresented his plans, and ignored his record.

Another Green Energy Company Stumbles: Fisker Announces Layoffs.  Fisker Automotive, the maker of an exotic electric sports car that is being built with help from a $529 million federal government loan guarantee, has announced layoffs at its Delaware plant as it tries to persuade the Department of Energy to send it more public funds.

Is Fisker the next Solyndra?  Fisker Automotive looks like it is on its way to a slow-motion crash, which would leave taxpayers on the hook for more than a half-billion through a loan the Obama administration co-signed.  The company makes electric/hybrid luxury cars in Finland that are sold in the United States.  In January, the company recalled all its 2012 Karma cars because they were fire hazards.  Fortunately, only 239 of them had been sold.  Now layoffs have begun.

Solyndra Casts Pall over 'Green Jobs' Promises.  Endowed with the blessings of the Obama administration and a loan guarantee of more than half-a-billion dollars from the U.S. Department of Energy, Solyndra LLC of Fremont, California has gone from the poster child of green energy to an orphan shunned by its former supporters.  Instead of becoming a Mecca for green jobs and employing thousands of workers as promised, Solyndra has shuttered its factory and fired all 1,100 of its employees.

$490,000 Green Stimulus Grant Produced 1.72 Jobs.  A "green stimulus" grant of nearly half-a-million dollars to grow trees in Nevada produced only 1.72 permanent jobs, according to the federal government's Recovery.gov Web site.  Although the green stimulus was advertised as a key component of "shovel-ready" jobs designed to boost employment rates immediately, the recipient of the funds now admits the grant had nothing to do with creating jobs.

An Administration's Green Fiascos Pile Up.  The Solyndra fiasco is the highest-profile of the president's many green failures, but it's hardly the only one.  Barely a week goes by but that we learn of yet another government-funded "clean energy" boondoggle.  Let's consider a few examples.

DOE-Backed Green Energy Company Amonix Lays Off Two-Thirds of Workforce.  Just seven months after California-based solar power company Amonix Inc. opened its largest manufacturing plant, in North Las Vegas, the company's contractor has laid off nearly two-thirds of its workforce.  Flextronics Industrial, the Singapore solar panel manufacturer that partnered with Amonix to staff the new $18 million, 214,000-square-foot plant, laid off about 200 of its 300-plus employees Tuesday [1/31/2012].

More Solyndra-style failure: Obama-tied Amonix Inc lays off most of company.  Some of President Barack Obama's top donors and fundraising bundlers are partners in Amonix Inc., the latest Solyndra-like corporate crash.  The company has announced a layoff of 200 workers — two-thirds of its workforce — despite a federal green-technology tax credit of $5.9 million in 2010.

USDA loan program 'creates' jobs for $2.5M each.  Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today [1/26/2012] announced his second bio-fuels loan guarantee in a week, revealing that the Agriculture Department (USDA) is slated to loan an Oregon biorefinery $232.5 million for a project expected to create 65 jobs and support 38 others.

When Will We Awake From Obama's Bad Green Dream?  The Obama administration promised a future with a clean, green economy.  Instead, it's left us with failed government "investments" in projects driven by politics rather than prudence.

Chris Horner Testifies on the Folly of Green Energy Policy.  [Scroll down]  More recently, the man who is now President Obama's chief science advisor, the climate activist John Holdren, used to publicly argue that we had too much energy, and that less efficient energy was much better for the economy because it required more workers.  This is an extension of the newly fashionable argument that our economic troubles are due to automation, from ATMs to the horrors of ticketing kiosks at airports.  Presumably shovel-ready jobs were a bad idea at the outset because they should properly have been spoon-ready, instead.  Regardless, "jobs" is not an argument.  There is no program that does not "create jobs" in the same way that these schemes do.

The collapse of the green-energy bubble.  The parallel-energy universe known as renewables, a place where dollars and economic theory know no bounds and make no sense, looks increasingly like a bubble set to collapse.

The Non-Green Jobs Boom.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported recently that the U.S. jobless rate remains a dreadful 9%.  But look more closely at the data and you can see which industries are bucking the jobless trend.  One is oil and gas production, which now employs some 440,000 workers, an 80% increase, or 200,000 more jobs, since 2003.  Oil and gas jobs account for more than one in five of all net new private jobs in that period.

Green Energy Is Awash in Red Ink.  American people are beginning to notice that the "green energy" is not so green after all, it is awash in red ink.  "Green jobs" were being promised all over Europe when Spanish voters swept into power the Socialist party in 2004.  More entitlements and withdrawal from the war in the Middle East were the icing on the cake.  The Socialists presided initially over a period of sustained economic growth.  Today Spain has 5 million unemployed, a huge public debt, and the "indignados" (the indignants) who are a small and disruptive minoritarios.

DOE Inspector General: Over 100 Criminal Investigations Of Obama Stimulus Spending.  The Inspector General of the Energy Department, Gregory Friedman, has been investigating the fate of the $35.2 billion his department received from the Obama "stimulus" disaster in 2009. ... When work did get done, the results were not impressive.  The Weatherization Program enjoyed a one thousand percent increase in funding, but Friedman reports that "weatherization work was often of poor quality," and "9 of the 17 weatherized homes we visited failed inspections because of substandard workmanship."

Your Cash for Their Clunkers.  Here's some investment advice:  When looking for tips on green technology plays, steer clear of the stock pickers located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  They've made a habit of investing your cash in their clunkers.  Following on Solyndra's great success comes Ener1 Inc., a lithium-ion battery maker also promoted by the White House. ... Ener1 was founded in 2002, went public in 2008 and has never turned a profit.  In August, it restated its earnings for fiscal 2010 at a $165 million loss — nearly $100 million more than previously reported.

$6,136,000 per job:
Broke Green Co. Greases Director Six Figures for Obama Loans.  A financially-troubled Canadian alternative energy company with ties to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid paid a director the lion's share of $758,828 (CAD) in reported consulting fees, according to an analysis of the filings made by the company. ... In the June filings for Canadian-based Nevada Geothermal, which according to the New York Times employs only 22 people in Nevada, the company's auditors issued "going-concern" warnings that without additional investment or revenues, the company could cease operations.  At stake is about $135 million in financing by the federal government including loan guarantees and grants, says the Times.

Pop Goes the Green Jobs Bubble.  Obama's 2009 $787 billion stimulus package included $500 million for training programs that were supposed to create new green jobs for thousands of middle-class Americans.  Last month, however, the Department of Labor's inspector general conducted an audit that found that as of June 30 — with one-third of the funds spent and more than 50,000 participants — only 10 percent of trainees were placed in jobs.  And only 1,336 participants, or 2 percent, had held jobs for six months or longer.

Labor Dept. Program Spends $121,000 Per Green Job.  The Department of Labor has spent $162 million on its own green jobs program, which has found steady work for just 1,336 people as of June.  That's just 2% of what the program targeted.

About those 5 million 'green jobs' that were supposed to be created...  As a snake oil salesman, Obama would have been a natural. ... Only an idiot or a crook would have believed the pledge by candidate Obama to create 5 million green jobs over a decade in which government would spend $150 billion on green energy.

Free-Market Green Jobs for $2.63 a Day.  The administration has just approved another $5 billion (or about 115,740 gardeners for reference) in loan guarantees for these types of programs, including one to an enterprise that Nancy Pelosi's brother-in-law is tied to (can you spell c-r-o-n-y?).  And as I write, there is new news that the $500-million green jobs training program came up short on its goals.

'Green jobs' farm in Colorado sheds jobs after receiving $200M in stimulus funds.  President Barack Obama's "green jobs" initiatives suffered another major blow late Monday [10/3/2011], as the nonprofit National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado, announced a plan to lay off roughly 10 percent of its staff through a voluntary buy-out plan.  According to the Denver Post, the lab plans to eliminate between 100 and 150 of its 1,350 jobs.

Ten Lessons from Obama.  [#4] Fairly or not, "green" no longer denotes a noble effort to conserve resources and achieve energy independence.  A Van Jones, a Solyndra, yet another promise to emulate Spain's windmills and solar plants, one more call to borrow hundreds of billions for high-speed rail, and more Al Gore profit-driven escapades and fiery outbursts finally add up.  Note that the president simply cannot any longer repeat the mantra, "Millions of new green jobs."  You see, there are too many video clips of such boasts associated with failed ventures.  The age of Obama has turned "green" into a refuge for scoundrels.

Nevada Geothermal Power:
The Next Solyndra?  The New York Times reports on another "politically connected clean energy start-up that has relied heavily on an Obama administration loan guarantee and is now facing financial turmoil."

DOE OKs $4.7 Bil In Loan Guarantees For (Maybe) 92 Permanent Green Energy Jobs.  With a deadline of today to finish several major green-energy loan guarantees, the Energy Department announced the completion of four of those loans for solar power projects this afternoon, together totaling more than $4.7 billion.  The number of permanent, full-time jobs these projects will create?  About 92.  That's nearly $52 million per job.

$737 Million Green Jobs Loan Given to Nancy Pelosi's Brother-In-Law.  It's increasingly hard to tell the government's green jobs subsidies apart from the Democrats' friends and family rewards program.

As usual, $2 million per job.
Spanish-Owned Firm Receives $132 Million Loan Guarantee From Energy Department.  Just one day before the controversial federal loan program that backed bankrupt solar company Solyndra was to end, a Spanish-owned firm received a $132 million loan guarantee.  Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced Thursday [9/29/2011] that Abengoa Bioenergy Biomass would receive the guarantee to support the development of a commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plant that is estimated to create 300 construction jobs and 65 permanent jobs in Kansas.

Why America's Future Job Growth Lies In Traditional Energy Industries.  How about those "green jobs" so widely touted as the way to recover the lost blue-collar positions from the recession?  Since 2006, the critical waste management and remediation sector — a critical portion of the "green" economy — actually lost over 480,000 jobs, 4% of its total employment.  Pay here is lower still, averaging something like $32,000 annually, about one-third that of the conventional energy sector.  The future of the rest of the "green" sector seems dimmer than widely anticipated.

DOE Mulls Green Energy Loans At $20 Million Per Job.  The Energy Department on Wednesday approved federal loan guarantees for two green energy projects totaling more than $1 billion.  It approved $337 million for a Mesquite Solar project in Arizona and $737 million for a Solar Reserve project in Nevada.  The projects would create a total of 52-55 permanent jobs, according to earlier DOE figures and company statements.  That's about $20 million per permanent job.

Top 10 Green Job Fiascos.  [#5] Weatherizing stupidity:  The city of Seattle received $20 million in federal stimulus money to help homeowners make their houses more energy-efficient.  Some 16 months later, 14 jobs were created and three homes were weatherized.  Most of the money went to a company to train workers to weatherize buildings, but the lack of demand for the service meant those trainees had no work to do.

Issa's committee: Obama's 'green jobs' push is 'propaganda'.  President Obama's push to create "green jobs" is "nothing more than a propaganda tool" that has resulted in minimal benefits for the economy, a report set to be released by Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Thursday [9/22/2011] says.  The staff report, which was obtained by The Hill, is the latest missive in a frontal assault by Republicans on the Obama administration's pledge to create millions of green jobs.

Obama officials play defense during 'green jobs' hearing.  U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis admitted Thursday morning [9/22/2011] during a congressional hearing that she and the Obama administration believe driving a bus that happens to run on "clean energy" should count as a "green job."

Republicans Grill Officials Over 'Offensive' Definition of Green Jobs.  In a series of tense exchanges, Republicans on a House oversight panel sharply questioned whether the Obama administration was looking to inflate the number of "green" jobs by using a broad definition — which, as it turns out, counts virtually anybody working in mass transit.

Solyndra scandal unraveling Obama's credibility.  An Energy Department analysis of Solyndra's business model performed two years ago predicted that the firm would run out of money in September 2011.  But that fact was ignored by the president and his political advisers who wanted a "green jobs" photo op, no matter the cost.

$10,888,000 per job.
Obama green-tech program that backed Solyndra struggles to create jobs.  A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show.  The program — designed to jump-start the nation's clean technology industry by giving energy companies access to low-cost, government-backed loans — has directly created 3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount, according to Energy Department tallies.

200K Businesses Are Not Billionaires!  Americans are already aware of what happened to bankrupt Solyndra when over $500 Million was just thrown away on Green Technology costing 10.88 million per job!  Now, the President is geared to add to that failure with other programs by taking even more money away from small business via higher taxes!

Snitch I must.  Mr. President, I know you're a pretty busy fellow with a full schedule of speeches and golf so you may not have heard about the $38.6 Billion in green loan guarantees that Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Jonathan Silver, executive director of the Energy Department's loan office have been giving out and/or approving.  You need to be told that over the past two and half years they have created only about 3,545 jobs.  Well Mr. President, that comes to about $10,888,575 per job. ... Our friends in the main stream media will only be able to keep a lid on this for so long.

Obama green-tech program that backed Solyndra struggles to create jobs.  A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show.  The program — designed to jump-start the nation's clean technology industry by giving energy companies access to low-cost, government-backed loans — has directly created 3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount, according to Energy Department tallies.

When going green goes south instead.  What could be more beautiful, never mind seductive, than the strategy to promote renewable energies and a "green economy," heralded as cure-alls for America's greatest challenges, most particularly economic stagnation?  But a funny thing happened on the way to green utopia.  High-paying, clean-tech jobs were a cornerstone of the 2009 stimulus bill, which appropriated $80 billion to promote the "green economy."  Yet, instead of putting us on the green-brick road to recovery, we've learned that subsidizing industry merely results in red — lost jobs, squandered taxpayer resources, scandalous bankruptcies and diminished prosperity.

Solyndra Workers Looking for Non-Green Jobs.  And if you needed more proof that "green" jobs are a myth, the workers of Solyndra are applying for government assistance to learn a new trade:  ["]Ex-employees of the failed solar panel company Solyndra have applied for aid under the federal government's Trade Adjustment Assistance program, the Labor Department has confirmed.["]

Don't Have Delusions About Green Jobs.  [Scroll down]  The hope expressed by President Obama that the transition to a new energy future can double as a way to preserve the mass production workforce of the mid-20th century seems at best delusive, at worst a cruel hoax — and actually most of the time a distraction from other more immediate and relevant economic problems.  The president's talk of green jobs reminds me of how the "Atari Democrats" of the 1980s used to muse that the industrial workforce displaced by the economic changes of the 1970s could find work making semiconductors.

Obama's "Green Economy" Debacle.  With the United States' official poverty rate now at a seventeen year high of 15.1 percent — and an actual poverty level that may be substantially higher — the absurdity of President Obama's advocacy of so-called 'green jobs' is increasingly clear.

Promises of green jobs start withering on vine.  Despite billions of dollars in federal investment and cheerleading from President Obama, even the most ardent supporters of a transformed, job-generating energy sector based largely on wind, solar and other renewable sources acknowledge that their dreams have not translated into reality.  The records for other countries chasing green employment opportunities have been equally unimpressive.

Obama Crony Socialism on Parade.  [Scroll down]  GM is now neck-deep in "green" non-energy energy.  Of the oh-so-successful Solyndra sort.  They last year received more clean (non-energy) energy patents than any other organization.  They are dramatically ramping up production of the unprofitable and unselling hybrid Chevy Volt.  And creating a like-model for Cadillac.  They have fitted an (again, unprofitable) Volt plant so as to be solar-powered.  Which cost $3 million — but only saves them $15,000 a year in electricity.

It is not the government's job to create jobs.  Green Jobs!  From Mount Olympus our Scientist-in-Chief descends to Earth to grant us environmentally friendly jobs that pay more, require fewer hours and will stop the oceans from rising.

Green Pigs Don't Fly.  Reportedly, Obama's jobs speech will focus on infrastructure spending, and much of that spending will undoubtedly be tied to the creation of "green jobs."  The problem is, what he has already spent has not created jobs.  According to the Heritage Foundation, it may well have cost jobs.  It has, however, enriched some of his wealthiest political contributors.  And that seems to be the real motive behind the president's infrastructure spending.  Not green jobs, but green pork.

Solar gold.  I am convinced that the green jobs that Barack Obama promised were simply a politically correct conduit to funnel taxpayer cash to the politically connected.

The Green Jobs, Clean Energy Scam.  There will probably never be a definitive calculation of how much money the United States (and other nations) has wasted on Green programs, litigation, grants, research, and projects such as those involving "renewable" or "clean" energy.  It will surely add up to several trillion because it has been going on for a very long time through administrations reaching back to Jimmy Carter's and Richard Nixon's.

Obama: $43m more for 'wind energy' green jobs.  President Barack Obama's administration rolled out a spending-heavy green energy package Thursday morning [9/7/2011], just hours before the economically embattled chief executive will give his "jobs plan" speech to a rare joint session of Congress.

Seattle: $20 Million Grant Creates 14 "Green" Jobs.  Seattle reaped the benefit of a $20 million federal grant to weatherize homes in one of America's "greenest" cities, and 16 months later, a whopping 14 jobs were created — making the cost per job a wondrous $1,428,571.  "The jobs are not there," Todd Myers, author of the book Eco Fads, told Fox News.

Obama blows another billion on green fantasies.  Last week, the Obama administration's Department of Energy announced it is extending an $852 million loan guarantee to something called the Genesis Solar Project in California.  Genesis, according to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, will be built on federal land and ultimately employ perhaps 800 people during its construction and 47 people once it is up and running.  This would seem to be a lot of money to generate very few jobs at a time when the nation is on the verge of bankruptcy, but the project really isn't about jobs.

Where the Jobs Aren't.  In his 2008 convention speech, Barack Obama promised to create five million green economy jobs.  The U.S. Conference of Mayors estimated in April 2009 that green jobs could account for 10 percent of new job growth over the next 30 years.  Alas, it was not to be.

Green jobs? Wot green jobs?  "Green jobs" are a chimera.  Though diverting taxpayers money into the renewable energy sector may indeed "create" jobs in the renewable energy sector, it will cost many more jobs in the broader economy. ... These same policies will, on top of that £250 billion cost, reduce GDP by 2 per cent to 3 percent for at least ten years.  This will cost Britain the equivalent of 60 percent of the amount the government spends each year on primary and secondary education.  Renewable energy will cost £120 billion — making it 9 to 10 times more expensive than energy from conventional sources.

Obama's Bad Bet on Green Energy.  Obama and Biden were literally invested in Solyndra's success.  The company got a half-billion-dollar federal loan guarantee, the first in a highly vaunted Department of Energy green-jobs program, as part of the stimulus.  This was supposed to be the new economic model:  government and its favored industries cooperating to lead the country into a green, politically approved recovery.  The showcase firm is now filing for Chapter 11 in an embarrassing blow to the premises of Obamanomics.

More about Solyndra.

Green Jobs' Arteries Clogged By Davis-Bacon.  President Obama's green jobs agenda has become a victim of its own red tape.  Several internal reports show that state-level projects have stalled for years due to federal regulations favored by labor and green groups — big boosters of the green jobs push. ... In 2009, Obama dedicated $7.2 billion of stimulus funds to build "clean tech" jobs.  He vowed to create 5 million jobs over the next decade.  So far, that effort has "created or retained" just 7,140 jobs, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.  That's about $1 million per job.

The Department of Energy is not a business.  Only someone investing other people's money, in this case the taxpayer's, could look at a half-a-billion dollar loss and call it a "success."  Since the Energy Department is driven by ideology, not profit and loss signals, the American taxpayer is going to continue to lose money on failures like Solyndra.  And as more stimulus "investments" in unsustainable companies dry up, more Americans will become unemployed.

Seattle Green Jobs Program Gets $20M, Creates 14 Posts.  A green jobs program in one of America's greenest cities is being called a bust 16 months after a $20 million federal grant to weatherize homes in Seattle ended up putting just 14 people to work in mostly administrative jobs and upgrading only three homes in the area.  "The jobs are not there," Todd Myers, who wrote the book "Eco Fads," told Fox News.  "So we're training people for jobs that don't exist."

Promise of Jobs from Solar, Wind Power a Hard Sell in the Desert.  Nevada is now by some measures the top producer of solar power in the country and home to some of the largest solar arrays in the world.  But it also has the nation's highest unemployment rate.

Energy Obamanomics: No green jobs and plenty of red ink.  So, how well have President Obama's "green jobs" initiatives fared?  The president recently toured Johnson Controls Inc., a Michigan company that received $300 million from "Obama's stash" to create — drumroll, please — a whopping 150 jobs.  Do the math:  That's $2 million per green job.  And this is the company the White House chooses to showcase?

Leave the Driving to Us!  Yesterday one of the stimulus-fattened alternative energy companies Obama propped up went bankrupt.  So much for green jobs.

Maxine Waters: Green Jobs Are a Lot of Talk.  Just this week, we had the story of a Seattle initiative that blew a cool $20 million in taxpayer money to create fourteen jobs.  An even worse dollars-to-jobs ration was achieved at Johnson Controls in Michigan, where $300 million was spent to create 150 jobs to manufacture batteries for electric cars.  Obama toured this plant as a "green jobs" success story earlier in August.

Evergreen Solar files for bankruptcy, plans asset sale.  Evergreen Solar Inc., the Massachusetts clean-energy company that received millions in state subsidies from the Patrick administration for an ill-fated Bay State factory, has filed for bankruptcy, listing $485.6 million in debt.  Evergreen, which closed its taxpayer-supported Devens factory in March and cut 800 jobs, has been trying to rework its debt for months.

Wasted Stimulus.  During the 2008 campaign, candidate Barack Obama said he would create 5 million well-paying "green" jobs within 10 years.  Politico has reported that "he's spent considerable time since entering the White House trying to make that happen."  Indeed he has, though there has been no payoff.  Yet he refuses give up on his quixotic quest.  Last week Obama toured to much fanfare a Johnson Controls plant in Michigan where $300 million in conservation grants produced 150 jobs — at a cost of $2 million per position.

Obama's Stimulus Created 'Green' Jobs at $2 Million Per Job.  President Barack Obama on Thursday [8/11/2011] toured a vehicle battery plant in Michigan, touting his administration's focus on green technology and jobs, at a corporation where federal money authorized by the economic stimulus law that Obama signed at the beginning of his presidency had created "green" jobs at a cost of about $2 million in federal subsidies per job.

EPA Regulation Would Cost $1.2 Million Per Job Created.  The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been promoting the job creation and health aspects of its impending regulations on the electric industry, but in congressional testimony an agency official admitted the impending regulations would cost business $10.9 billion and create only 9,000 full time jobs.

The Global Warming Hoax: How Soon We Forget.  While Americans are rightfully focused on the unemployment situation and the debt limit negotiations, we've pretty much forgotten about global warming as an issue ever since Obama failed to pass his Cap & Trade bill.  As a result, we're becoming complacent once again about the huge threat we face from the progressives' attempts to control the world's energy industry based on the greatest scientific hoax in human history.  In reality, however, nothing's changed, as Obama is still imposing his will on us through the EPA's regulation of CO2.  This hoax still threatens our economy, while advancing the UN's "Agenda 21" in more ways than one.  It's also the foundation of Obama's "green jobs" approach to the unemployment issue, since the very concept of "green jobs" is just as bogus as the idea of a "carbon footprint."

Top 10 Examples Proving Obama Wants High Energy Prices.  During his acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama promised that if elected President, he would "invest $150 billion over the next decade in renewable energy -- an investment that will lead to new industries and 5 million new jobs."  Nearly a quarter of the way into that dream, Obama's own Council of Economic Advisers says that only 225,000 green energy jobs were created or "saved" after an $80 billion down payment from the stimulus package -- an astounding $335,000 per job.

Green Energy Fantasy.  The hope is that these government sticks and carrots will turn today's pitiful "green energy" industry, which produces an insignificant fraction of American energy, into a source of abundant, affordable energy that can replace today's fossil-fuel-dominated industry.  This view is a fantasy — one that could devastate America's economy.  The reality is that "green energy" is at best a sophisticated make-work program.

The Green Jobs Myth:  Even if we could find evidence that green energy is more labor intensive than its brown counterpart, that's an argument against green energy because one does not go about creating wealth by maximizing the inputs associated with production.  Were that the case, one might suggest that future green energy facilities (and brown, for that matter) be built without any mechanized construction equipment whatsoever — only hand tools allowed!

The "Green" Jobs Canard.  For too long, politicians, environmentalists and subsidized proponents of "green" jobs have been peddling the notions that "investing" in green technologies is the illuminating endeavor and beneficent job creator of our time.  With scant evidence, these green jobs postulates are bulwarked by so much hot air it rivals the amount of subsidized dollars used to sustain them.  The main dilemma of green jobs and investing is that they defy the reality of basic economics.

Obama's Green-Jobs Fantasies.  In judging any government initiative, such as Obama's green-jobs plan, you can't look just at the credit side of ledger because the government is unable to give without first taking away.  Worse than that:  Inevitably, more is taken away — destroyed — than is given because the government substitutes force and taxation for consent and free exchange.  Instead of a process driven by consumer preferences, we get one imposed by politicians' grand social designs.  It's what F.A. Hayek called "the fatal conceit."

How Green Is Your Lost Job?  A study of renewable energy in Scotland shows that for every job created in the alternative energy sector, almost four jobs are lost in the rest of the economy.  We've seen this movie before.

Obama's Edifice Complex.  Obama's justifies his plans by touting "green jobs".  This is a fiction.  Any green jobs generated come at great cost and are often temporary.  A fringe benefit for Obama is that these federally-funded projects often go to union members and are subject to the Davis-Bacon act that requires high wages be paid on federally-funded projects, a subtle method of replenishing the union coffers for the next election cycle.

Killer Green Jobs.  As has been well publicized, Spain lost 2.2 jobs lost per 'green jobs' created.  Italy lost 4.8 jobs per 'created' job.  And, today, from the UK, 3.7 jobs lost.  Which is why all of the EU countries are stepping back from what they created.

The real cost of 'global warming'.  [Scroll down]  When pressed on this, politicians talk airily of all the "Green jobs" which will ensue from "investment" (ie massive taxpayer subsidy) in renewables and of all the "energy security" which will result.  The chutzpah required to come out with this guff is astonishing given that there is not a scintilla of real-world evidence to back up these claims.  We already know that wind and solar power have proved a disaster in Germany, Denmark and Spain (where Dr Gabriel Calzada Alvarez calculated that for every "green job" the country had destroyed 2.2 jobs in the real economy).  We also know that because of the unreliability of wind power, it has to be permanently backed up by conventional power.

Green Jobs Are Not Evergreen Jobs.  After receiving at least $43 million in aid from the state of Massachusetts, Evergreen Solar announced last month that it would be closing its manufacturing plant in Devens, Mass., laying off its 800 workers and moving its manufacturing operations to China. ... These are the "green jobs" that President Obama has touted as part of his "winning the future" agenda.

The Unseen Consequences of "Green Jobs".  A new report, "Defining, Measuring, and Predicting Green Jobs," by University of Texas economist Gurcan Gulen, issued by the Copenhagen Consensus Center, takes apart many studies predicting that policies mandating alternative energy production, energy efficiency, and conservation will create a boom in employment.  First, Gulen notes that many such studies fail to define clearly what they mean by green jobs.  He points out that many pro-green jobs studies do not distinguish temporary construction jobs from more permanent operation jobs.  Many studies also assume that green jobs will pay more than jobs in conventional energy production.  But why would a construction job at a wind farm pay more than one at a conventional power plant?

Green-energy plant sucks up subsidies, then goes bust.  To turn wood chips into ethanol fuel, George W. Bush's Department of Energy in February 2007 announced a $76 million grant to Range Fuels for a cutting-edge refinery. ... Last month, the refinery closed down, having failed to squeeze even a drop of ethanol out of its pine chips.  The Soperton, Ga., ethanol plant is another blemish on ethanol's already tarnished image, but more broadly, it is cautionary tale about the elusive nature of "green jobs" and the folly of the government's efforts at "investing" — as President Obama puts it — in new technologies.

Spain's Solar Industry Leading U.S. to Nowhere.  A report last week estimates that the Spanish solar industry has lost more than 30,000 jobs since 2008, due to the rollback of solar subsidies.

Solar Panel Maker Moves Work to China.  Aided by at least $43 million in assistance from the government of Massachusetts and an innovative solar energy technology, Evergreen Solar emerged in the last three years as the third-largest maker of solar panels in the United States.  But now the company is closing its main American factory, laying off the 800 workers by the end of March and shifting production to a joint venture with a Chinese company in central China.  Evergreen cited the much higher government support available in China.

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. ... The anti-energy Left wants you to have the energy you need, that is if you agree with them that you don't 'need' very much.  They want energy scarcity.  It is fair to say they want energy poverty.  And they are willing to say anything to get it.  Except they are reduced to remarkably weak claims.  Guys, your precious renewables are rat holes.

Going Broke by Going Green.  [Scroll down]  As to "green" jobs, Competitive Enterprise Institute energy analyst Chris Horner calculates that the stimulus bill's subsidies for wind and solar mean taxpayers are billed $475,000 for each job created.  Texas Comptroller Susan Combs reports that property tax breaks for wind projects in her state cost nearly $1.6 million per job.  "Green energy" is simply unsustainable, environmentally and economically.

Revolt brewing in Spain over 'green energy' crisis.  So here's the latest from our president's erstwhile glorious peoples' economic model — which he, oddly, no longer cites — socialist Spain, where a revolt is brewing.  It is by now fairly well-known in these parts, to the great embarrassment of the Obama administration, that the Spanish government's "green economy" power grab that Obama so often publicly praised actually proved to be enormously destructive.  As is pretty much always the case with the greens' harebrained schemes these days.

Green Jobs Promises Dwindle as Obama Policies Backfire.  The subject of green jobs was conspicuously absent from President Barack Obama's most recent $50 billion stimulus proposal.  By contrast, about $92 billion in taxpayer funds — more than 11 percent of Obama's original $814 billion stimulus package, enacted in early 2009 — went to an assortment of renewable energy projects.  But the jobs that were supposed to be created never materialized — at least not in the United States.

Obama's Green Economy Mirage.  In 2008, 1.2 billion cell phones were made and sold worldwide.  Not one was made in the USA.  Dell, one of the largest manufacturers of computers, closed its last plant in Winston-Salem in November and laid off 900 workers.  Computer manufacturing in the U.S. employs fewer Americans in 2010 than it did in 1975.  Printed circuit boards were perfected in the U.S. after World War II and are used in thousands of products worldwide.  84% of circuit boards are now made in Asia.  In 2001, the U.S. ranked fourth in per capita broadband Internet use; today we rank 15th.  What next?  Obama has touted the "green economy" as the answer to the need for new good paying jobs.  It's not happening either.

Green Jobs Not Growing As Expected.  The Obama Administration channeled $90 billion of the $870 billion dollar stimulus package towards the new green economy.  The hope was that a national move from fossil energy to green energy would not only be good, long term, for the environment, but that the transition could also be a jobs' driver, which would help resuscitate the overall economy.  But two years into Obama's administration, the White House has reported it's helped create 224,500 green jobs, far short of the 5 million it had openly predicted.

The Editor says...
That's $400,890 per job created.

Cap-And-Trade Tosses An Anchor To Drowning California Economy.  On Friday [12/17/2010], the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the bureaucracy charged with implementing AB 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, adopted a cap-and-trade scheme to reduce California's greenhouse gas emissions by about 15% by 2020.  CARB's regulations go into effect in 2012.  The unelected officials at CARB intend to reorder California's use of energy.  In so doing they blandly declaim that their rules will create jobs while admitting to higher energy costs and a slowing economy.  Somehow, this formula is transmogrified by CARB analysts into net job creation.  Given the immutable laws of math, one is forced to calculate that CARB's actions will "create" low-paying jobs at the expense of good jobs.

What the Election Means for Greens.  In President Obama's erstwhile model, Spain, it cost them $750,000 per (temporary) "green job," placing the nation's energy infrastructure and economy in peril and its politics in crisis.  Once constituencies become dependent on these schemes, they are extremely difficult to halt.  Yet all over Europe, Obama's previously touted model states are struggling to rein in the subsidy schemes which threatened to expand the Greek "contagion."  These are economic black holes paying small fortunes for each job created, crowding out private-sector growth, and displacing real jobs that respond to market forces with temporary jobs that disappear once the subsidy does.  Meanwhile, they create higher energy costs, which make them much worse than other make-work programs like ditch-digging.

WaPo Exposes Reality of Unemployed "Green Jobs".  In a front page story today, the Washington Post — of all places! — revealed that unemployment for so-called "green jobs" is pretty darn high.  You mean, all the Obama and enviro promises about green jobs being the next, great economic boom were ... wrong?  People aren't voluntarily choosing to pay more for "clean energy"?  Who could have guessed that the Great Green Dream has been "undercut by the simple economic fact that fossil fuels remain cheaper than renewables"?

The Green Bubble is about to Burst.  [Scroll down]  The White House claims that the federal cash subsidy will create three hundred permanent jobs (at about $3 million per job!).  The nature of the jobs is not specified, but one may assume that there will be much need for sweepers to remove dust and dirt from about 7,000 acres of solar mirrors.  Not exactly "high-tech," is it?

California's Green Nightmare.  It's hard to know where the fairy tale of "green jobs" first came from.  It was probably a clever marketing scheme by radical environmentalists who realized that their anti-growth climate change agenda wasn't going to sell among the American electorate if workers realized how many jobs would be eviscerated by the new taxes and regulation.  So, from somewhere out of Madison Avenue or K Street, the left devised the green jobs story line:  we can impose a $1 trillion new tax on the U.S. economy over the next decade, and it will save jobs, as hundreds of thousands of Americans begin assembling windmills and solar paneling.

Obama's 'Green' Energy Plan Infringes on Liberty.  In numerous speeches, President Obama has stated that America's energy policy should be modeled after Europe's failed "green energy" project.  During a speech in Ohio, Obama claimed that countries in Europe have superior energy policies, "And think of what's happening in countries like Spain, Germany and Japan, where they're making real investments in renewable energy.  They're surging ahead of us, poised to take the lead in these new industries."  In reality, Europe's experiments with government subsidized renewable energy and "green" jobs have been a costly disaster.

Green lipstick on the stimulus pig.  Jobs that carry the "sustainable" stamp of approval will siphon precious taxpayer resources away from the private sector.  It's simply putting green lipstick on the stimulus pig that has squandered more than a trillion dollars with no positive effect on the jobless rate.

California's Green Nightmare.  It's hard to know where the fairy tale of "green jobs" first came from.  It was probably a clever marketing scheme by radical environmentalists who realized that their anti-growth climate change agenda wasn't going to sell among the American electorate if workers realized how many jobs would be eviscerated by the new taxes and regulation.  So, from somewhere out of Madison Avenue or K Street, the left devised the green jobs story line:  we can impose a $1 trillion new tax on the U.S. economy over the next decade, and it will save jobs, as hundreds of thousands of Americans begin assembling windmills and solar paneling.

Academic environmentalist arrogance.  According to [an] ASU Magazine story, one Timonie Hood, a career environmental activist, works in the "'new green economy,' a fast-growing sector that carries with it great hope for economic growth."  Really?  What "hope" does the green economy provide?  People that have placed "hope" in a "green economy" have come out worse for their trouble.  Spain is the most notable example, where going green turned into an unemployment and economic disaster.

One Job Forward, Two Jobs Back.  The Great Obamanomic Job Creation Machine rumbled into action again over the Fourth of July weekend, promising to spend as much as $2 billion to support creation of 1,585 "permanent" jobs by two solar energy companies.  That comes to a potential cost of over $1.25 million per job.

Obama team uses flimflammery to inflate job numbers.  Are you a financial adviser?  You may not know it, but you've got a green job.  Are you a wholesale buyer?  You've got a green job, too.  Or maybe you're a newspaper reporter.  You, too, have a green job — at least according to the Obama administration.  For months, Republican Sen. Charles Grassley has been pushing the administration to substantiate its claims of having created nearly 200,000 green jobs.  More fundamentally, Grassley has asked Labor Secretary Hilda Solis to state clearly what a green job is.  So far, he hasn't gotten an answer.

Enviro jobs are fake-o jobs.  Whatever "green jobs" are, it's very clear America doesn't want them.  President Obama has been pushing a proposal that would spend more than $1 million for each permanent green job created in a solar-power boondoggle.  Billions were placed at the disposal of avowed communist Van Jones to create these sparkling emeralds of environmentally sensitive employment even though no one in the administration can explain what they are.

Obama awards huge loan guarantees to solar companies promising scant jobs gains.  During his weekly address to the nation over the Fourth of July weekend, President Obama announced that the Department of Energy was awarding $2 billion in loan guarantees to two energy companies — Abengoa Solar and Abound Solar Manufacturing.  The plan, Obama said, is for the companies to use the money to construct solar plants and panels to power thousands of homes — and create 5,000 jobs in the process.  Only about 1,600 of those jobs are slated to be permanent, though, meaning that the total cost to the taxpayer for each permanent job would exceed $1 million.  But over the past week, observers have questioned whether even that high figure accurately represents the total cost of the president's plan.

The Green Wind Of Destruction.  To say we're skeptical of the administration's claim that green jobs will bolster economic recovery is putting it mildly.  It's much easier to believe that needless environmental rules will cause widespread job losses.

Green Job Efforts Kill 2.2 for Every One Created.  The Spanish government's renewable energy initiatives have destroyed 2.2 jobs for every new "green" job created, concludes a new study by economics professor Gabriel Calzada of King Juan Carlos University in Madrid.  Calzada says American jobs will suffer the same fate if the United States similarly attempts to promote renewable energy at the expense of conventional energy sources.

'Anti-Lobbyist' Obama Administration Recruited Left-Wing Lobbyists to Sell Bogus 'Green Jobs'.  A FOIA [request] reveals the Department of Energy turned to George Soros and to wind industry lobbyists to help cover up two economic studies pointing to the failure of European wind energy programs.

DOE E-Mails To Wind Energy Lobbyists Cast Cloud Over Green Jobs Proposals.  The Energy Department worked closely with the wind industry lobby to discredit a Spanish report that criticized wind power as a job killer, internal DOE e-mails reveal.  The e-mails obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request show how, starting last April, lobbyists at the American Wind Energy Association became alarmed that lawmakers were citing a study by Spain's King Juan Carlos University.  The study found that Spain's massive investments in wind power cost 2.2 jobs for every "green" job created.

Unpleasant surprises buried in cap and trade.  If cap and trade is an energy and global warming bill, why is a three-year package of unemployment benefits, job training and relocation expenses buried deep within its fine print?  And why is a federally subsidized "job bank" needed if laid-off workers would quickly be rehired for higher paying "green" jobs?  The fact that generous unemployment benefits are buried in the bill means that "green jobs are bunk," the conservative Heritage Foundation's Ben Lieberman told The Examiner.

The Myth of 5 Million Green Jobs.  [Scroll down]  The central finding of the study is that — treating the data optimistically — for every renewable-energy job that the government finances, "Spain's experience reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about 9 jobs lost for every 4 created."  Despite expensive and extensive green-job policies, a surprisingly low number of jobs were created.  And about two-thirds of those "green" jobs were just to set up the energy source, in construction, fabrication, installation, marketing and administration.  Only 10 percent of the green jobs created were permanent jobs actually operating and maintaining the renewable sources of energy.

'Green Jobs' Picture Mostly Shades of Gray.  "Green jobs" have been touted as the silver bullet for the nation's growing unemployment problem, jolting the economy out of recession, ridding dependence on foreign oil, and making the environment cleaner.  It's an enticing solution to cure much of what ails our country today.  Unfortunately, such initiatives are often too good to be true, which requires a look into the underlying reality of the green jobs plan.

Tilting at Green Windmills.  The Spanish professor is puzzled.  Why, Gabriel Calzada wonders, is the U.S. president recommending that America emulate the Spanish model for creating "green jobs" in "alternative energy" even though Spain's unemployment rate is 18.1 percent — more than double the European Union average — partly because of spending on such jobs?  Calzada, 36, an economics professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, has produced a report which, if true, is inconvenient for the Obama administration's green agenda, and for some budget assumptions that are dependent upon it.

'Green jobs' studies contain fundamental flaws, think tank experts say.  As Congress debates this week the Obama-Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade anti-global warming bill, its advocates frequently claim that moving to alternative energy sources will create legions of new "green jobs."  Those claims are often backed by reference to one or more of a trio of supposedly scientific studies ... Problem is, accoding to Beacon Hill, all three are based on fundamentally flawed reasoning.

Chortling At Chu.  Subsidizing alternative energy fits the classic definition of insanity. Despite huge subsidies, it has proved to be neither cost-effective nor a reliable, significant contributor to our national power grid.  Yet we keep subsidizing it, expecting a different result.

Green-collar promises and realities.  Energy-efficiency efforts have been ongoing for decades.  Calling the relevant positions "green-collar" is good PR, but often merely redefines previously existing jobs and doesn't expand the actual employment base.

The convenient fantasies of President Obama:  If there were money to be made in green jobs, private investors would be creating them already. ... Big business is ready to create green jobs — if government subsidizes them.  But the idea that green jobs will replace all the lost carbon-emitting jobs is magical thinking.

Green Jobs and a Green Economy Will Fail Like Van Jones.  Van Jones perpetuated the view that environment and climate change are ideal vehicles for advancing total government control.  In 1993 former Senator Timothy Wirth, now Director of the UN Foundation, said, "We've got to ride the global warming issue.  Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy."
Italics in original.

Obama Uses Feds to Protect His 'Green Jobs' Fantasy.  On numerous occasions, to tout his own agenda President Obama told America to "take a look at what's happening in countries like Spain" to witness his model for a "green jobs" economy.  Well, a team of Spaniards produced an academic study, officially of King Juan Carlos University in Madrid, which revealed that Spain's scheme has proven a disaster.

Green jobs offer limited hope to Iowa.  When the Pella Corp. closed its local factory last year, Story City looked to the booming wind industry to replace some of the nearly 250 lost jobs.  In came NextEra Energy Resources, which agreed to invest $20 million in a facility at Story City to repair generators for the company's wind turbines in Iowa and other states.  The number of jobs NextEra will create — 25 — represents only one-tenth of what was lost when Pella left.

What Green Jobs?  President Obama devoted nearly $60 billion of his stimulus package to building a new green-based economy rich in renewable energy and strategies to cut carbon.  But despite the price tag, not one green job yet exists.  It comes down to a problem of etymology.  No one can yet agree on what a green job actually is.

Obama's Green Jobs Program:  $135,294 Per Job.  [Scroll down]  Obama says the grants will create 17,000 cleantech jobs.  Well, get out your calculator.  $2.3 billion for 17,000 jobs equals $135,294 per job.  (And that's not including the eventual interest on this deficit spending).  Those green jobs had better pay well over six figures to justify that expense.  Not to worry, the administration has a plan to solve this, too.  It wants Congress to approve another $5 billion for "tens of thousands" more green jobs.

The Lies about Green Jobs.  So-called Green jobs depend on two of the most impractical and unreliable sources of electricity generation.  Solar and wind farms require backup by coal-fired and nuclear power sources for the blatantly obvious reason that the sun does not shine full-time, nor do the winds blow full-time.  These, plus biofuel producers, are parked on the doorstep of Congress to secure the subsidies they need just to be in business; subsidies that are derived from our taxes.

Unions Try to Monopolize Green Jobs.  [Scroll down]  One of the more startling revelations at the forum came in testimony from Stephen Worth, President & CEO of Worth and Company, a merit shop mechanical contractor out of Pipersville, Pennsylvania, currently employing more than 400 people.  Amid testimony of union harassment and exclusion from contracting bids was a startling revelation of union methods to monopolize "green jobs" through illegitimate and discriminatory regulatory definition.

Wind turbines fail in Minnesota's cold weather.  President Obama is telling Americans to count on the creation of "green jobs" to help ease the rising unemployment in the country.  These green energy failures only further the concern that pinning the country's economic salvation on the hopes of an industry still facing performance issues hardly makes any sense.

New Wind Farms in the U.S. Do Not Bring Jobs.  Nearly $2 billion in money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been spent on wind power, funding the creation of enough new wind farms to power 2.4 million homes over the past year.  But [a recent] study found that nearly 80 percent of that money has gone to foreign manufacturers of wind turbines.

Think Color Of Money, Not Trees When It Comes To 'Green' Jobs.  President Obama has spent billions on so-called green job programs as part of the economic recovery and plans to spend billions more.  He has repeatedly argued this will create good-paying jobs that cannot be outsourced.  But, according to the green groups themselves, these jobs can be highly expensive, often costing well more than $100,000 per job in subsidies and/or tax credits.  Just last month, the White House said it was spending $135,294 per job to create 17,000 green jobs.

The "Green Jobs" Scam Unmasked:  According to a series of new reports, billions of dollars in "stimulus" money that was supposed to go toward creating "Green Jobs" here in America instead went to foreign-owned companies — who "created or saved" the vast majority of their jobs overseas. ... Worse still, the lunacy isn't stopping.  We are continuing to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into this failed framework, which uses American sweat to create permanent positions (and profit) for foreign companies.

A green-jobs tale, blowing in the wind.  For a brief period last spring, a university study out of Spain whipped up excitement among Republicans on Capitol Hill — and brought heartburn to environmentalists and renewable-energy lobbyists in the process — because it purported to show that government support for "green jobs," a signature push by the Obama administration, ultimately hurts employment more than it helps.

Green-Jobs Fantasy:  A recent report from German think tank RWI sets out what happened in Germany.  Titled "Economic Impacts from the Promotion of Renewable Energies:  The German Experience," it illustrates how the German green-jobs initiative failed to meet any of its objectives.  Taking jobs first, the report concluded that although at first glance the green-jobs program had been a great success, producing 278,000 extra jobs by 2009, once one takes into account offsetting factors, such as jobs lost from increased energy prices, the net number was negligible or even negative. ... The RWI found that the subsidy per job amounted to $240,000.

Downgraded Spain decides to shelve worthless enviro-energy projects.  They tried to crucify Gabriel Calzada for pointing out that their wind and solar programs were a big waste of money.  But even the Spain's socialist government recognizes economic reality when default comes knocking.  You can't keep spending $750,000 per "green" job created when you're going broke.

Spanish paper:  Obama driving off 'green energy' cliff.  Chris Horner has been all over the story of Spain's unimpressive experience with green energy.  Spanish newspapers have finally called out the U.S. President for choosing a failed model for a "Green Economy."

Leaked Spanish Report:  Obama's Model 'Green Economy' a Disaster.  As predicted was inevitable, today the Spanish newspaper La Gaceta runs with a full-page article fessing up to the truth about Spain's "green jobs" boondoggle, which happens to be the one naively cited by President Obama no less than eight times as his model for the United States.  It is now out there as a bust, a costly disaster that has come undone in Spain to the point that even the Socialists admit it, with the media now in full pursuit.

The Green Jobs Myth.  A Spanish economics professor said attempts by his country to create a green economy would fail.  Now a Spanish government report confirms his findings, blunting claims that the professor's report was biased.

'Green New Deal' is a raw deal for the U.S..  In Europe, green ideas have been in fashion for two generations and have driven policy to a much greater extent than in the United States.  Despite this, we have not witnessed a sizable green wave of new jobs, as evidenced by our unemployment rates, which are routinely several percentage points higher than in America.  The green movement has succeeded in generating increased government spending and subsidies at taxpayer expense.  Much of this spending has been directed toward inefficient renewable-energy projects, such as solar and wind power.

Billions for 'green jobs,' whatever they are.  Buried deep inside a federal newsletter on March 16 was something called a "notice of solicitation of comments" from the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Department of Labor.  "BLS is responsible for developing and implementing the collection of new data on green jobs," said the note in the Federal Register, which is widely read by government bureaucrats and almost never seen by the general public.  But the notice said there is "no widely accepted standard definition of 'green jobs.'"  To help find that definition, the Labor Department asked that readers send in suggestions.

Even Obama Is No Longer Pushing Green Jobs.  [Scroll down]  Whip out your calculators:  82,000 into $20 billion means those green jobs cost about $243,902 each.  Let's hope they pay well.  The high cost per job should come as no surprise; despite the hype from green groups and the administration, cleantech jobs generally require enormously expensive subsidies.  For example, back in January, the administration was touting the $2.3 billion in manufacturing tax credits as creating 17,000 jobs — or about $135,294 per job.  Even that tally proved to be overly optimistic, given the fact that many of those jobs went to other countries.

Obama's Costly Green Jobs Project.  The transcript of President Obama's weekly address on whitehouse.gov is titled, "President Obama Lauds Clean Energy Projects as Key to Creating."  Creating what? one might ask.  The word "Jobs" seems to be missing, perhaps like the jobs themselves.

Obama's Sunshine Scam.  [Scroll down]  DuPont is expanding its facility in Circleville, Ohio, to manufacture solar energy materials, accepting $56 million in federal stimulus and state aid for the $175 million project.  What does the taxpayer get for all that money?  Seventy new jobs created, 444 existing jobs retained and 230 construction jobs.  Add all the jobs up and divide and you get a per job cost of $235,000, $76,000 of which comes from taxpayers.  Taxpayers are on the hook for about $114,000 for each stimulus-funded solar panel job at projects in Longmont, Colo., and Tipton, Ind.  Then there is the $592,000-per-solar-job cost at the Emmet J. Bean Federal Center in Indianapolis, Ind.

$450 Million in U.S. Stimulus Money Going To Chinese "Green" Company?  It seems that some of that Obama-Reid-Pelosi stimulus money, which was supposed to be used to help create jobs here at home, may be helping to stimulate the Chinese economy instead.  This would be on top of the help that the Chinese would get competitively if Obama's cap-and-trade proposals are ever enacted.  As reported by MSNBC, top Democratic fundraisers, union supporters and lobbyists with links to the Obama White House are behind a proposed wind farm in Texas that stands to get $450 million in stimulus money.

Obama's big chance.  It's hard to see how the news could be any grimmer for Labor Day 2011:  no net new jobs created in August, the first time since 1945 that's happened. ... Plus, the fairy tale of government-fostered "green jobs" just blew up.

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Updated November 19, 2024.

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