As a repository of reader insight adding context to or exposing flaw or omissions of a paper’s news and editorial pages, the letters section of the Wall Street Journal is typically unmatched among other outlets.

I have spent some time on the phone and in correspondence with the Letters editor to conclude he is thoughtful and on the ball, though exceptions to the page’s excellence occur. While we do not expect perfection here on earth, sometimes these exceptions are so ridiculous as to demand ridicule. Saturday’s Letters page is a case in point.

Wind’s taxpayer lifeline is expiring, and you can feel it in the air. Responding to a piece touting shale gas, a windmill enthusiast wrote to defend the honor of his beloved pinwheels against gas, a proxy for abundant, reliable (they always work, so you can actually run an economy on them…wind, well, not so much) fossil fuels:

The energy to service a wind farm is free. For gas generation you need water, steel, energy, labor, chemicals and food stocks…

If there is a point here it must be to imply that wind energy is cheaper. It is a twist on the old line spouted by “renewables” pushers, “the wind and the sun are free!”, ignoring that wind and solar power are bloody expensive.

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The headline in today’s ClimateWire (subscription required) blares “U.N. says turning lights on for world’s poor need not boost CO2.” That is, we can provide electricity to 1.5 billion people who have never flipped a light switch and not see an increase in emissions of carbon dioxide (until the global warming fad/excuse for doing things statists like to do, this was called plant food, the driver of photosynthesis).

CO2 is released not just by oceans when they warm (absorbed when they cool) or decaying plants, or people exhaling, but combusting “fossil fuels” like the coal, gas, and, in some places, oil used to create electricity. CO2 emissions generally correlate with economic prosperity–more on that, momentarily.

But there is even less to this absurdity than meets the eye. Here’s how the ClimateWire story opens: (more…)

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has learned of a UN plan recently put in place to hide official correspondence on non-governmental communication accounts, which a federal inspector general has already confirmed are subject to FOIA requests. This “cloud” serves as a dead-drop of sorts for discussions by U.S. government employees over the next report being produced by the scandal-plagued IPCC, which is funded with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Although this is seedy and unlawful at any time, it also goes in the “bad timing” file, especially for the Obama Administration and the UN.

Just as a brand new book further exposes the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (whose scams I dissected here, and in more disturbing detail here), and on the heels of the weekend surprise of a 2005 memo showing President Obama’s cooling/warming/population zealot of a “science czar” John Holdren is the kind of guy Mitt Romney turns to for developing his “environmental”’ policies, we’ve exposed the Obama administration and IPCC have cooperated to subvert U.S. transparency laws, operating domestically out of Holdren’s White House office.

With this morning’s Freedom of Information Act request, the explaining they have to do must begin by providing the taxpayer certain records regarding — including but not limited to — user names and passwords for a backchannel ‘cloud’ established to hide IPCC deliberations from FOIA, thereby also seeking to undermine the Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978. (more…)

This Rick Perry video — which is really all about Mitt Romney — has caught some attention on the heels of a front page story by the Wall Street Journal raising the issue of Mitt Romney’s record on energy and environment issues. It’s not on the editorial page, mind you, but the less market-friendly news pages. This is a good thing, and wherever it leads, I do not believe the video can be shown, viewed or written about too often.

Mr. Romney finds himself needing to detach himself from these past positions on environmental issues without painting a target on his back for more accusations of flip-floppery. Otherwise, he must plainly state that voters should expect him to stick to his prior instincts on these issues.

This is too big a topic to pussyfoot around. The importance of Romney’s views on energy and his courting of environmental lobbyists — including a venture capitalist about to take the reins of what has become the world’s largest (and worst) VC slushy fund — cannot be overstated at this point.

This would be true even without Solyndra having exposed many voters to the growing fiscal disease in “green” industries, which is so typical and predictable that some of us foresaw it long ago.

Romney’s seeming embrace of the corrupt environmental lobby is made all the sadder by the fact that this country has a real opportunity for a spectacular revival with a domestic energy production boom. But such a change will require a leader with both strong vision and the will to stand up to anti-business, anti-energy extremists. (more…)

“EU Carbon Trading Rocked By Mass Killings”, “Armed Troops Burn Down Homes, Kill Children To Evict Ugandans In Name Of Global Warming”

These two headlines from today’s Global Warming Policy Foundation update ought to finally shake some sense into any of the many US companies pushing for our involvement in the Kyoto debacle. That’s a demand invented by Enron (greenies, I was in the room, don’t bother), and I particularly recall DuPont’s rep whining like a child to the US representative about their being denied the right to cash in, at a State Department briefing at one global confab I attended in 2002.

This is particularly true on the heels of the experience of Coca Cola and Unocal with the 1789 Alien Tort Claims Act, under which they were sued to pay for the actions of a government in whose country they operated.

Specifically, news reports indicate that:

“Armed troops acting on behalf of a British carbon trading company backed by the World Bank burned houses to the ground and killed children to evict Ugandans from their homes in the name of seizing land to protect against ‘global warming,’ a shocking illustration of how the climate change con is a barbarian form of neo-colonialism.

The evictions were ordered by New Forests Company, an outfit that seizes land in Africa to grow trees then sells the ‘carbon credits’ on to transnational corporations. The company is backed by the World Bank and HSBC. Its Board of Directors includes HSBC Managing Director Sajjad Sabur, as well as other former Goldman Sachs investment bankers…

Villagers told of how armed ‘security forces’ stormed their village and torched houses, burning an eight-year-child to death as they threatened to murder anyone who resisted while beating others.

‘We were in church,’ recalled Jean-Marie Tushabe, 26, a father of two. ‘I heard bullets being shot into the air.’

‘Cars were coming with police,’ Mr. Tushabe said, sitting among the ruins of his old home. ‘They headed straight to the houses. They took our plates, cups, mattresses, bed, pillows. Then we saw them getting a matchbox out of their pockets.’

‘But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming,’ reports the New York Times.”

To beat some too-typical greens to their punch, no, this is not what happens when one introduces “market mechanisms” into environmental schemes.

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With the administration rushing out billions more in these final hours before the fiscal year — and apparently their political slush fund — expires, and news reports rapidly exposing that the ‘green stimulus’ money was something of a Democrat “friends and family” — now for major donors, too! — it’s time to recall what each and every such project had in common, possibly assisting in explaining the proliferation of what might be described as ‘cronies’.

Solyndra may only, as administration apologists cite, represent about 1% of ‘green’ stimulus loot, and friends and family may prove to be parties in some percentage — say, between half and 99% — of the greendoggle recipients. But 100% of the recipient projects require government schemes to exist, and 100% are designed to socialize the risk, keep reward with private ‘investors’ (term used loosely for reason of the socializing of the risk), and pay off for reasons other than their performance or their economics.

When such projects exist — and they do always thanks to the political process — well, cronies do tend to abound. It’s less a bug than a feature.

Specifically, think back to that October 2010 internal memo to the president from senior administration officials including then-National Economic Council chair Lawrence Summers, reported on by the Wall Street Journal and noted (with somewhat less context and illumination) this week by the Washington Post. In it, Summers shared a commonsensical worry: “He believed the government would end up funding projects that would have been built anyway or funding projects that flopped.”

Those two categories represent precisely the universe of what these programs fund.

In the order described by Summers, that would be guaranteed-market schemes like wind farms and solar arrays, and manufacturers of the wind and solar gadgets.

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The Solyndra scandal involving the squandering a half a billion taxpayer dollars down a campaign supporter’s rathole, and then subordinating the taxpayer to another of said supporter’s interests in apparent violation of the Energy Policy Act, marches on. And as it does, so do the ramblings of Obama administration apologists sensing the danger posed, and their talking points are becoming increasingly confused.

But one distraction has proved persistent within the repertoire even as others get tried out. It is a new utilitarian “green” talking point, applied so far to the entire suite of folly, from electric cars to windmills, and thus deserves response. That is, we had to make bold moves on this front or face the prospect of falling behind China in the great [insert green boondoggle here] race.

Given that this does not seem to be going away any time soon, please consider the following about the alleged Yellow Peril.

Americans should be far more concerned about Belgium producing better beer, chocolate and Brussels sprouts than us than over the prospect of China developing a superior solar panel. It’s a solar panel. Not Flubber.

I understand that this can be difficult to keep in mind with all of the mysticism attached to anything labeled “green”. But the romantic folly is getting really expensive.

Solar electricity generation was first patented in 1888 and Music Men have sauntered into town ever since vowing revolutionary this and that and cost competitiveness juuust around the corner — it’s always been just around the corner, and always will be — and that they’ve finally fixed the bugs in the system such that it’s now viable…some of which bugs upon scrutiny are actually features (the sun, like the wind, is intermittent, that is, it isn’t an alternative to something that works when you need it, let alone all the time; and it is very diffuse, meaning it takes a lot of space to produce a little).

And so we’ve squandered scores of billions time and gain. Yes, billions. So much for “isn’t it time we began investing in…”

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The White House’s Solyndra game plan and that of its talking head and media enablers is now apparent and requires correction.

First, the notion that Solyndra failed because China subsidized their own solar companies is absurd: these companies only exist where their host governments are propping them up. Period.

Next, it is clear from administration emails that the White House’s message was not, as Dem talking heads and other apologists are now offering, ’since you are approving this, we will schedule the visit’; it is instead, ’since we are scheduling the visit, this will be approved.’

Although this is apparent throughout, one message particularly captures it:

“We have ended up with a situation of having to do rushed approvals on a couple of occasions (and we are worried about Solyndra at the end of the week).  We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews and have the approval set the date for the announcement rather than the other way around.”  August 31, 2009, email between OMB and Terrell McSweeny of the Office of the Vice President, regarding “DOE Announcement.

This running governmental contracting scam makes the $600 toilet seat of the 1980s — which was bad, because, uh, it was the military — look pathetic. Obama’s green temporary jobs, by its own varying estimates, range in cost to the taxpayer from $355,555 (overall) to $479,000 (Solyndra) to $4.8 million if you remove the really temporary installation gigs. But that’s, um, ‘green’, so it’s not like the $600 toilet seat, at all.

Worse, after having shown the due diligence of the average Bernie Madoff investor desperate to leap on to a trendy ride their associates assured them was hot, the Obama administration is now rushing to emulate Madoff himself. The only twist on the analogy is that they are using you, the scheme’s old entrants — who in this version of Mr. Ponzi’s construct, never actually get paid off, but only his non-contributing buddies do — as its new, involuntary entrants .

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And Watergate wasn’t the defining episode of the Nixon administration. But that’s how desperate Team Obama have become. And with today’s House hearing cancelled after the Solyndra gang phoned in a no-show, methinks this is not the end or even the beginning of the end of what Solyndra will tell us about Obama’s term.

Countering WaPo’s front page story showing deep and intense White House involvement in rushing through $535 million in taxpayer dollars to the brainchild of major Obama contributor George Kaiser, failed solar panel boondoggle Solyndra, today’s E&E Daily has a story (subscription required) “Democrats launch counteroffensive on Solyndra”.

The hand-waiving effort — Schwarzenegger was a fan! A Solyndra exec is a registered Republican! The program Obama abused was originally created by Congress during George W. Bush’s presidency! (untrue, “Sec. 1705″ was a 2009 project in the…stimulus bill…of Henry Waxman (D-CA)) — concludes with the following cry for help, or at least for a good fisking:

Other Democratic leaders were quick to pan the RNC’s attempt to make Solyndra the face of the stimulus effort.

“Solyndra is unfortunate. Did it not work? It didn’t work apparently. But that’s not the face of the Recovery Act,” said House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) in an interview.

I’m sorry…whose effort to make Solyndra the face of ’stimulus’?

Which other project received — on top of the internal push to rush a half-billion dollars to this “NOT ready for prime time” (per an OMB email) project — personal attention and public promotion by the Energy Secretary, Vice President, and President? But, no, it wasn’t the face of ’stimulus.’

But, what of that whole presidential address, whose details make this claim something less than near-fetched:

“So that’s why we’ve placed a big emphasis on clean energy.  It’s the right thing to do for our environment, it’s the right thing to do for our national security, but it’s also the right thing to do for our economy.

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“Science!”: Beyond the Pose, Mr. Huntsman, What Would You DO?

When that silver-haired Republican candidate weighs in on the ‘climate’ debate I want to stick around until the end of the video. I love that line, “Good heavens, Miss Nakamoto, you’re beautiful!”

Wait, that’s not Magnus Pyke?

Seriously. Mr. Huntsman, beyond the pose: what would you do? “Science!” is a talking point. More of a pose, really, of being the thoughtful man while its success depends on no more than Pavlovian nodding and clucking in response. Anything else ultimately arrives at the question Hunstman’s pose begs:

What. Would. You. Do.?

What’s your point? You’re down with the kidz on campus and your media base can rest easy because you’re not, you know, ‘crazy’ as you say? Or you’re going somewhere with this? Is it cap-and-trade? Kyoto? Kyoto II? Carbon (dioxide…meaning ‘energy’) taxes?

What? And after you answer that, well, without using the word “science(!)”, please then state why?

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A lead story in Wednesday’s trade press publication E&E Daily was “Energy, fighting EPA at the core of GOP jobs agenda”. This is true, but also reveals what may be the greatest gap between Obamanomics and an approach to governance that most Republicans claim to support:

• Obama treats the energy sector like a centrally planned jobs program, putting the boot on the neck of the stuff that works while ‘creating’ politically desired but economically unsustainable positions making politically desired but economically undesirable products. Republicans argue that if wind- and solar-powered electricity, pioneered in the 1890s, work then they will work but in the meantime creating jobs in the energy sector means getting your boot off the neck of the stuff that works.
• Obama and his team have long argued that their costly regulations will actually create jobs. Of course, every program, regulation and even hurricane “creates jobs”, just not on net. The administration either doesn’t get ‘net’, or thinks you will be persuaded by ‘the seen’ and imagine there is no unseen.

EPA administrator Lisa Jackson embarked upon a campaign to advance these absurd arguments in February, arguing that, e.g., if she adopts a rule requiring you to do something costly or even prematurely destroy capital, why, you’ll have to hire someone to do it!

The WSJ accurately characterized this philosophy: “In other words, the government should harm an industry and force it to ruin working assets so maybe other people can clean up the mess.”

Obama administration “green jobs” emissary Jackson also said these will require many more new environmental regulators. Yes, she said that, risible dogma that was repeated by administration apologists as recently as this week on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show. So they aren’t giving up on it.

Except… On the Friday before this past long holiday weekend, President Obama somewhat buried a rational decision if a decision, like Thursday’s speech announcing Son of Stimulus, rooted entirely in his own political needs.

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Sarah Palin weighed in with a very important point in the policy debate about the role of government. Her Saturday speech, among other things, took a swipe at the country’s dilemma of booming crony capitalism:

[T]he permanent political class …[use] taxpayer dollars… to bail out their friends on Wall Street and their corporate cronies, and to reward campaign contributors, and to buy votes via earmarks. There is so much waste. And there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys.

Amen. Immediately, the media and other Democrats, as well as some Republicans, pointed out that this label sticks to Texas Governor Rick Perry just as it does to President Obama and that, assuming Perry is the Republican nominee, it will have limited resonance in the 2012 debate.

There is an element of truth to this, though that seems to be as much an effort to dodge discussion (or Obama’s record) as it is to accurately represent matters.

First, about the phrase, ‘crony capitalism.’ After addressing it recently on television someone emailed me and asked if I would please deploy the term ‘cronyism’ since, after all, this is just corrupt abuse of taxpayer money and not at all capitalism. I get that. But you ride the waves that come in, and rhetorically, this practice is “crony capitalism” and will remain so barring a full airing of the practice’s true extent and insidiousness.

That Perry, like it seems most politicians, has some things to answer for on this front seems hardly enough to neuter Obama’s awful exposure to the charge (see, e.g., his many waivers from ObamaCare going 50% to union members who only represent about 7% of the workforce, as well as “Obama’s Enron“, the $535 million green jobs boondoggle Solyndra).

It is axiomatic that crony capitalism and similar corruption is rampant, in many forms, among businesses that would not exist but-for largesse transferred to them, by politicians, from taxpayers. Such industries, and the practice of propping them up in the name of one or another fads or theories, invite this.

The increasingly popular “green jobs” schemes — the White House claims more than $80 billion of the $800-plus billion ’stimulus’ went to these, whatever their  definition encompasses — are therefore rife with moral hazard. After all, they exist for reasons other than their economic s or their merit; their pitch is “unless you give me this preference, mandate or bag of money why, I’ll disappear”.

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Chatter began to emerge on Thursday about the unique treatment received by the bankruptcy-declaring Solyndra, a government-dependent maker of solar panels whose scheme, shaped somewhere between a pyramid and a trapezoid, was described in the Washington Post no less the following way:

“You make something in a factory and it costs $6, you sell it for $3, but you really, really need to sell it for $1.50 to be competitive,” Lynch said of Solyndra. “It was an insane business model. The numbers just don’t work, and they never did.”

And yet, as the LA Times editorialized:

“Solyndra was the first company to be awarded a federal loan guarantee under the stimulus, worth $535 million. Taxpayers are likely to end up on the hook for much if not all of that amount, a highly embarrassing development for President Obama because he was among the company’s biggest cheerleaders. He visited its Fremont plant in May 2010 even though PricewaterhouseCoopers had weeks earlier raised doubts about its plans for an initial public offering by questioning whether it could continue as a going concern. …”

Also, “Other flags have been raised about how the Energy Department pushed the deal forward. The Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News and ABC disclosed that Energy Department officials announced the support for Solyndra even before final marketing and legal reviews were in. To government auditors, that move raised questions about just how fully the department vetted the deal — and assessed its risk to taxpayers — before signing off.”

Given the obvious rat-hole nature of the lost half-billion, LAT piquantly inquired, “is Obama using stimulus funds to reward his political contributors?” By all means, follow the odor of the ties between major Solyndra backer, key Obama fundraiser George Kaiser of Tulsa.

But there is another question about what political deal may have been involved in the Solyndra boondoggle.

Solyndra resides in Fremont, California, which in turn rests within the then-cozy confines of California’s 13th Congressional District, represented by Fortney “Pete” Stark. As chairman of the tax-writing Ways & Means Committee’s Health Subcommittee during Obama’s push for Obamacare, Stark was critical to Obama’s signature step in ‘fundamentally transforming America.’

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WaPo reports on the back of its A section Saturday that

An Interior Department scientist returned to work Friday, six weeks after he was suspended in connection with a probe of whether he improperly assisted another polar bear researcher in obtaining a federal contract….

Monnett was being investigated for improperly helping a researcher at Canada’s University of Alberta draft a response to a federal request for proposals on a polar bear study. Monnett chaired the committee that eventually awarded the contract to the university.

In the letter, the special agent in charge quotes the contract officer as saying that if Monnett had informed her about his collaboration with the University of Alberta researcher, “she would have warned you that such actions would have been highly inappropriate under procurement integrity policies and procedures.”

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz wrote in an e-mail that Monnett “was informed that he will have no role in developing or managing contracts of any kind, and will instead be in our environmental assessment division.”

Because, apparently, integrity is not so much a concern there.

Although I do think I recall other such problems arising when such foxes guard the hen house. Oh, yeah, then there was this, too. Er, and this. A whole pattern of isolated incidents.

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“I do believe that the issue of global warming has been politicized. I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. I think we’re seeing it almost weekly or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. Yes, our climates change. They’ve been changing ever since the earth was formed. But I do not buy into, that a group of scientists, who in some cases were found to be manipulating this data.”

Not much to quibble with Texas Governor Rick Perry about there. Except if you’re the Washington Post which, like Politico, cannot countenance Perry’s refusal to bow at the altar of what has been decided. So for his apostasy WaPo gives Perry a whopping “four Pinocchios” in a sneering, nasty and intellectually dishonest piece, “Rick Perry’s made-up ‘facts’ about climate change”, rife with straw men, heavy on double standards, and otherwise mixing and matching errors of omission and commission.”

First, an editorial note. WaPo reveals its delirium on the issue by citing polls as its apparent evidence for man-made climate change, concluding with “After all, it was first established in 1896 that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could help create a ‘greenhouse effect.’” Apple, meet orange.

This non-sequitor misreads WaPo’s own cited source and is more confused than the ritual confusion of climate change with man-made climate change, then conflated with the alleged catastrophic climate change (which WaPo also then offers). So, Mr. Kessler, the greenhouse effect, in existence somewhat longer than man, enables life on earth. Man does not help create it. It’s here with us, or without us. On WaPo’s relative scale, this scolding of another for supposed ignorance, clueless about that of which it scolds, merits at least five Pinocchios.

Perry’s camp referred ’something called’ the Washington Post to “something called the Petition Project, which claims to have collected the signatures of 31,487 ‘American scientists’ on a petition that says there is ‘no convincing scientific evidence’ that human release of greenhouse gasses will ’cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate.’ The petition is a bit old, having been started in opposition to the 1997 Kyoto agreement on global warming.”

WaPo, using a week’s worth of sneer quotes if still citing ‘no convincing evidence’ of catastrophic heating, just polls of other people not addressing ‘catastrophic climate change’, didn’t like that.

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This WaPo article — “Obama tries to change subject back to green jobs” — is an instant classic of a new, Obama-era genre: cheerleading for expensive schemes which exist solely due to political whimsy and consideration, and are therefore little more than make-work.

The item begins, “After spending weeks talking about topics he probably would have preferred to avoid — debt limits, deficits, a plunging stock market — President Obama will hit the road Thursday to talk about jobs. Specifically, about how his administration is trying to create more of them.”

The green ones. Which schemes failed where the president used to tell us to look but no longer does because the failures were exposed. As his spokesman admits “the White House doesn’t create jobs”.

And his critics say he’s out of ideas! But, hmm. Yes. I suppose that ‘green jobs’ thing went over well last time he led with it. Still, if ending up as a punch-line is victory, what does defeat look like?

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Remember when Barack Obama – with the dignity and off-prompter grace, evincing deep understanding of the issues and the eloquence for which he is fawned over by the media – offered this gem:

Everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma, they end up taking up a hospital bed, it costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early and they got some treatment, and a, a breathalyzer, or inhalator, not a breathalyzer. (crowd laughing) I haven’t had much sleep in the last 48 hours.

Here he was promoting his health care takeover, though he and his also invoke children with asthma to push his global warming, anti-energy agenda — asthma being on the rise as emissions from cars and coal-fired power plants dramatically declined; obviously emissions from coal-fired electricity and cars air pollution must be the culprit. Or something. Expect to see a few in the debt-ceiling fight.

Well, things do get more confused with his own administration guilty of escalating a war on these breathalyzers or inhalators or gassificationators. You see, the best and cheapest inhalers have been phased out because their propellants are Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), substances targeted as ozone depleting substances. Replaced with extraordinarily powerful greenhouse gases, incidentally. Necessitating a…war on coal-fired electricity. Wash, rinse, repeat.

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Imagine my surprise to receive, within the span of minutes, both the following news story in Energy &Environment Daily — ” EPA: Jackson summons top aides for budget pow-wow as GOP sharpens knife: In the face of drastic funding cuts and a hostile political environment, U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has told her top deputies to rank which of their programs they deem to be essential and which could fall on the budgetary chopping block” — and the following invitation, just circulated around EPA headquarters.

Just keep this in mind when the results of this “pow-wow” — ritual demagoguery and a lot of talk about children, seniors and the poor — pop in the next few days.

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Ever since these two interviews in Forbes Magazine, in which CEOs of rent-seeking utilities blurted out that that of course they were behind the cap-and-trade/global warming legislative agenda, because they receive a large wealth transfer in return for helping the statists grow the state, I have maintained the following very basic principle: crony capitalists, when engaged in behavior the public would be less than pleased with were it brought to their attention, ought to not allow their CEOs to give interviews.

But here we go again. Today, T. Boone Pickens went on the air with Bloomberg and proved way too much about his latest great idea — on the heels of also pushing the global warming agenda, specifically a national windmill mandate — to mandate a market for his huge natural gas investments (windmills generally don’t work so require a gas plant to be built for ‘backup’. Windmill mandates failed, politically, but he had a backup ready there, too).

This is, naturally, a backdoor for the climate agenda. As Christine Todd Whitman recently and precisely admitted about the whole ‘clean energy’ Plan B, incidentally, in defending President Obama from Al Gore’s barbs.

His next Pickens Plan is at root a cash or clunkers scheme gone stark raving mad.  And remember, this was considered less appealing than a windmill mandate. It seeks to force the transport sector onto natural gas where that is not in fact economic. Hence the big ol’, new government scheme a la ethanol and wind and solar subsidies and preferences, and the mélange of ethanol subsidies and mandates which it more closely resembles.  Requiring, e.g., auto dealers to float not five grand or so but up to $64,000 per vehicle, to ultimately be paid back by you and I, it is little wonder Pickens thought a windmill mandate was the less-bad bet.

T. Boone is of course not alone among gas interests to have bet big and come up short on the global warming agenda, seeking to scare people into allowing the state to for all intents and purposes regulate coal, our most abundant energy supply, out of existence.

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From ClimateWire (subscription required):

Nuclear operators announce offset purchase (07/06/2011)

NEW YORK — The operator of two upstate New York nuclear power plants yesterday announced a purchase of carbon offsets in the state.Entergy Corp., a power generator in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and elsewhere, says it has completed the purchase of slightly less than 35,000 tons’ worth of greenhouse gas emission reduction credits certified by the nonprofit American Carbon Registry (ACR).

The company runs the controversial Indian Point nuclear power plant near New York City along with the James A. Fitzpatrick nuclear power plant on the southeastern shore of Lake Ontario [NB: to clarify this emphasis, the utility actually gets less than half its production from nuclear, with half coming from gas and coal].

The company says it bought the offset credits to boost its environmental credentials, using money from its designated environmental initiatives fund….

“We first set up this environmental initiatives fund back in 2001. We funded it at a level of about $5 million a year for a …[total of] $20 million…” (emphases added)

So. $20 million taken out of the hides of ratepayers, and that means the economy, in a posturing won’t you please love me scheme cooked up with the greens — that is, agreed by no one who actually paid the tab — for ‘green’ posing.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg that is already being inflicted on the economy, before Obama’s ‘other ways to skin that cat’ kick in. Incidentally, Entergy, like AEP, and Duke Energy, Exelon and some other utilities desirous of a state-managed wealth transfer are behind the agenda to mandate ever more of this, but designed (by them) to line their pockets instead of just paying for their posing.

So, keep admitting these things, my rent-seeking crony capitalist friends. Keep talking.

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