Obama administration colluded with 'windmill welfare queens' to rebut European 'green job' studies

"Windmill welfare queens" -- the corporations who stand to benefit from carbon regulation, and who already benefit from massive subsidies -- are telling Americans that they can "have their cake and eat it too" when it comes to emissions controls and so-called "green jobs." A FOIA request now reveals that as the Obama administration scrambled to respond last year to strong evidence that "green jobs" are a massive an economic drain, costing 570,000 Euros apiece, Department of Energy officials relied heavily on Big Wind and its monied backers.

Writes Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

As candidate and president, on eight separate occasions Barack Obama instructed Americans to “think about what’s happening in countries like Spain [and] Germany” if they wanted to know what successful “green jobs” policies look like, and if they wanted to know what we should expect here in the U.S. from his agenda.

Some European economists took a look. In March, a research team from Madrid’s King Juan Carlos University produced a detailed, substantive, heavily sourced, two-method paper: “Study of the Effects on Employment of Public Aid to Renewable Energy Sources.” The paper concluded that Spain’s “green jobs” program was an economic failure, in fact costing Spain many jobs.

...[T]he Spanish study embarrassed the White House, prompting substantial media attention and even questioning at a press conference, Obama swapped out Denmark for Spain for later references to an enacted “green jobs” program.

Soon, Denmark produced a study (“Wind Energy: The Case of Denmark“) through the think-tank CEPOS. This paper also revealed tremendous costs, and that Obama’s claim about Denmark’s “renewables” experience was also steeped in mythology.

...Back in the U.S., the American Wind Energy Association — the lobby for “Big Wind” in Washington, D.C., which includes a few Spanish wind giants — also attacked the publication of the Spanish paper. Soon, the Obama administration published a five-page talking points memo assailing the economic assessment — written by two young, non-economist, pro-wind activists from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Boulder, Colorado...drafted in often personal terms.

It's well worth reading the whole thing to understand the relationship between the Left in government and the rent-seeking corporations who make their money not by producing anything, but by putting their hands in the next guy's pocket.