WaPo has a front page piece titled (in the print edition, and teased as such on the home page), “The climate issue takes a back seat”. It begins by noting that “Heather Zichal, deputy assistant to the president for energy and climate-change policy, makes a forceful case for the need to slash greenhouse-gas emissions and boost the efficiency of cars and small trucks: The moves will cut America’s oil consumption, foster the nation’s energy independence, save consumers money at the pump and help revive domestic auto manufacturers.”

Its second paragraph is an intended-to-be-impactful, lone sentence, isolated in the physical layout: “What she doesn’t volunteer is that they will curb climate change”.

WaPo’s best defense for this stunt is that it wasn’t really saying the ‘global warming’ rules would curb climate change, but just saying the White House aide doesn’t volunteer that they do (the reason for this being a Stan Greenberg poll “urging Democrats to play down ‘global warming’“, dropping “warming”, “climate” and “cap-and-trade” in favor of re-branding the effort as “clean energy”. That is, in effect counseling Dems to be even less candid than their Plan A of an end-of-days  fear-based campaign aimed at attaining public acquiescence for state-created energy scarcity).

Later in the piece, WaPo quotes a greenie as saying “I don’t blame the president for the failure of climate legislation, but I do hold him accountable for allowing opponents to fill the void with misinformation and outright lies about climate change”.

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This week I filed a lawsuit against the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in federal district court in the District of Columbia on behalf of The American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center. On the heels of obtaining a court order last month compelling the University of Virginia to produce the long-sought ‘Hockey Stick’-related records, ATI’s transparency project now seeks to force NASA to release ethics records for taxpayer-funded global warming activist Dr. James Hansen, specifically those pertaining to his outside employment, revenue generation, and advocacy activities.

What we are trying to determine is whether NASA approved Hansen’s widespread, well-documented, high-profile and, it turns out, extremely lucrative “outside employment and other activities”, permission for which must be obtained in writing, in advance. Public financial disclosures and other documents reveal that he has received at least $1.2 million in the past four years, more than doubling his taxpayer-financed salary.

You may have seen Monday’s Washington Post front page article, titled in the print edition “Deliver the sound bite, watch donors eat it up: incendiary comments can light a fire under candidates’ fundraising”. As we demonstrate in our complaint, the connection seems to exist elsewhere in government, too.

That is, although we removed from the final version a reminder of Hansen’s escalation to knee-jerk invocation of Nazi analogies, this remains a key point about this gusher of outside income. All of which comes on top of — and, more troubling, is all “related to” and is sometimes even according to his benefactors expressly for — his taxpayer-funded employment.

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The Washington Post had a story on Sunday titled, in its print edition, “Obama’s return to Europe in a changed world”. It chronicled how “the dominant themes of the president’s European tour, set to begin Monday, highlight how much the world has changed over that time. As he enters the second half of his term, security issues, in South Asia and the broader Middle East, have replaced the economy as the chief shared interests of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful allies.”

Er…what? The absence of a certain ‘greatest threat facing mankind’ is a bit of a red-flag for someone who has chronicled the establishment press having thrown in completely with (selective) political hysteria over the climate issue, and the havoc that ’skeptics’ of the computer model projections and the policies have allegedly caused. And, incidentally, with no interest in the havoc the actual models have caused here in the real world through policies premised in them.

I scanned the full-page article for mention of Obama’s swift reversal of Bush’s alleged recklessness or, barring that, of the now surely worsened climate crisis and the stalled Kyoto process, that Obama didn’t, in fact, rush to ’sign the Kyoto Protocol’ as Bush supposedly neglected per the media for eight years (Clinton signed it; Bush never unsigned it), comfortable I would find no such cheerleading, or keening.

That is of course because of the uncomfortable truth that political realities led Obama to continue the Bush policy of continuing the Clinton-Gore policy of not seeking ratification of Kyoto. And, further, he continued the Bush rejection of the Kyoto model, agreed to by Clinton-Gore to the great foreign policy and otherwise political detriment to the U.S. in ensuing years.

And, on cue, a story in a trade press outlet yesterday writes:

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The Wall Street Journal has a long piece about the prospect of using the state to move part of the U.S. transportation fleet from oil-derived fuels to natural gas. It gives prominent voice to the massive public affairs campaign of T. Boone Pickens, undertaken in the apparent quest for a legacy, locking in subsidized billions for his natural gas fortune as a swansong to a prosperous career.

This campaign takes the form of a bill embraced by ostensible fiscal hawks, causing an uproar and enabling the media to describe the Republicans ‘circular firing squad’, of a base taking umbrage at Members abandoning their pledges of fiscal sobriety at the drop of a billionaire’s phone call. Well played, gentlemen.

The vehicle was not Pickens’ first choice. His first choice was a windmill mandate, transparently pushed by a handful of gas interests, including Chesapeake Energy’s Aubrey McClendon, to put a green hat on their efforts to use the state to displace coal’s market (one of McClendon’s group’s first television ads stated up front, “more wind means more gas”: windmills don’t work that often, so they need ‘backup’ to run wastefully all the time, cycling up and down, and for various reasons inevitably this means gas-fired electricity).

Coal was difficult to budge, what with centuries of it domestically, so some gas folks have been helping the greens’ war against coal for about two decades. This is their latest foray.

And, astroturfers, please hold the mail. I happened to be in the room in 1997 with the American Gas Association, BP, and Enron as they worked with green pressure groups, as radical as the Union of Concerned Scientists as well as more mainstream, anti-coal activists like NRDC, to get a global warming treaty and a domestic cap-and-trade scheme. I couldn’t believe my ears and said so, which in a matter of weeks led to us parting ways.

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The Washington Post has a predictable, propagandistic lead Monday editorial — “Climate change underscored: A new report leaves little room for doubt” — that merits a fisking for the prominence given such admittedly non-newsy, if wildly spun and internally inconsistent, repetitiveness (emphases added throughout):

“CLIMATE CHANGE is occurring, is very likely caused by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.”

So says — in response to a request from Congress — the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, the country’s preeminent institution chartered to provide scientific advice to lawmakers.

Ah, so — the implication is clear — it is a panel of scientists; wait, not just scientists, but climate scientists, and worthy of description as ‘preeminent’. But, then, the piece continues oddly without elaboration on this hint:

In a report titled “America’s Climate Choices,” a panel of scientific and policy experts also concludes that the risks of inaction far outweigh the risks or disadvantages of action.

Well, as Hoover fellow Paul Gregory notes, prompted by similar slop from the New York Times, “Of the first eight names, only one appears to be a climate scientist. The others are engineers, lawyers, and public policy types”.

But of course, we’re used to these gents being railroad engineers (the IPCC’s chief scientist, Rajendra Pachauri) and anthropology teaching assistants (see the IPCC ‘world’s leading climate scientists’). By the next paragraph, however, surely the reader would begin wondering what is such a panel of scientists doing making these recommendations, which are in fact policy calls?

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What else can one say about this?

Governor Christie to Talk Global Climate Change with Scientists

Governor tells NJ Environmental Federation his original doubts were due to not having a “fully formed opinion.”

The Republican governor, who caused a stir when he told a town hall meeting he was unsure about the science of global warming, plans to sit down this week with a couple of climate change scientists recommended by the New Jersey Environmental Federation.

As I have noted, translated, the latter means a Castro toady and some of his pals.

Wait, lemme guess: his doubts arising from an unfully formed opinion have evaporated under further scrutiny, making this the first time further scrutiny led to siding with the global warming movement?

Er, maybe. There’s another option, and that’s that he’s seen the New Hampshire Senate fold like a cardboard suitcase on withdrawing from the RGGI regional cap-n-trade energy tax and has decided to throw in with the go-along-to-get along crowd. In his defense, and not much of one, one could say as Andrew Dice Clay once did about a famous painting I won’t mention here as it would make the gag’s crudeness too obvious: he needed the money.

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So. With yesterday’s farcical Senate theater, the brain-trust begs a very basic question:

“Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., who presided over the hearing [said] ‘Businesses should make a profit. That’s what drives our economy. But do these profitable companies need taxpayer subsidies?’”

Huh. Sen. Baucus, you come out in the black, and every year, too. And it’s fair to say, you are somewhat subsidized by the taxpayer, non? The salary, of course. The car. The driver. Retirement lucre. The trips to and from the office and your home. Often, that’s ‘homes’.

Biiiiig taxpayer-subsidized (actually, provided) budget to underwrite  your work, which of course does nothing so harmful as produce a product driving our economy. More like slowing it down, if fiddling here and there in hope of engineering outcomes desired by your political class along the way.

Then there are the junkets, and for those you may bring with you. The per diems. The mail costs to promote yourself. Then there’s that health insurance. Yep. Really something when someone, who could pay for these things without the taxpayer propping it up, has hard-working people foot the bill for doing his business.

And as a result you’re now worth …ok, well, there’s a little confusion here, with you having reported a negative net worth, while buying a $900,000 home.

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Consider these two dueling headlines in today’s ClimateWire and their sub-heads (subscription required), as helpful reminders of how absurd U.S. energy politics have become (and why no one points to Europe any more as our ‘green energy’ model).

More important, they bring a little more focus on what appears to be the Republicans’ moment of deciding who they are, and who they will be.

1. BUSINESS: Solar industry sees some economic clouds after Italy slashes subsidies

…Italy, which last year installed 14 percent of global new solar capacity, recently became the latest country to slash its solar subsidies, delivering another blow to the industry as falling solar panel prices and weak demand have led several manufacturers to downgrade their sales and profit forecasts for the year.

2. FINANCE: Bill Gates calls for more U.S. clean energy investment…

Yes, Gates in an ‘investor’ in these things that, according to the various industries’ own press releases, exist only by the grace of, and cannot survive without, wealth transfers and other favors from the government. Oh, on a related note, another erstwhile windmill promoter — because that seemed to be a good way to use the state to create more market share for his gas interests — has decided, upon the failure of said windmill schemes, that a Plan B is in order.

And on cue, while we’re worried about spending and subsidies and distorting markets in favor of things that can’t make it happen on their own, (and told that our political class, are too), 180 Members of Congress are trying to create a new energy subsidy, one that would divert a product used in numerous other applications critical to our economy.

Because these interventions have worked out so well in the past. Hmm. Maybe, the plan is such a brilliant idea that the economy just can’t see it. Er, four ethanol boondoggles — toss in state-dependent wind, solar and natural gas cars — are better than one. Or something.

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David Kreutzer of Heritage has a great item up on The Foundry, on WaPo’s remarkable (it was WaPo!) exposé of the miracle Chinese bullet trains actually leaving a trail of, well, leaving fiscal and other wreckage in their wake. He concludes, “Well, the Chinese finally have a green-energy idea worth stealing: arrest government officials who foist overpriced, underperforming, debt-ballooning, money-losing projects on taxpayers.”

In case you missed the WaPo piece, the man in charge of China’s model train set:

“is ruined, and his high-speed rail project is in trouble. … his ministry has run up $271 billion in debt — roughly five times the level that bankrupted General Motors. But ticket sales can’t cover debt service that will total $27.7 billion in 2011 alone. Safety concerns also are cropping up.

Faced with a financial and public relations disaster, China put the brakes on Liu’s program. On April 13, the government cut bullet-train speeds 30 mph to improve safety, energy efficiency and affordability. The Railway Ministry’s tangled finances are being audited. Construction plans, too, are being reviewed.

Liu’s legacy, in short, is a system that could drain China’s economic resources for years. So much for the grand project that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times likened to a “moon shot” and that President Obama held up as a model for the United States.”

In short, it’s an awful lot like Spain’s wind- and solar program President Obama also longs to impose here.

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Two pieces Friday, right on the heels of another yesterday and on top of what we already know (if largely ignore), combined to emphasize just how at sea the lovely, formerly prosperous, but now economically zombified California is dooming itself and its citizenry.

Normally this would call for a Gallic shrug – people get the government they elect, and therefore deserve – but for the inescapable likelihood the federal taxpayer will pick up the tab for a bailout, and that whatever strings come with this bailout they inevitably will not rise to the level of getting rid of the problem.

First was a ClimateWire story (subscription required) with the risible headline, “Calif. sees ‘wake-up call,’ opportunities from China’s green-tech industries”. This exposed California’s vision, to anyone having ventured even the remotest, unblinkered survey of the relevant issues, as a tragic farce.

Reporting on California officials emphasizing their vow to replicate a Chinese manufacturing boom, the story read “In a short period, China went from being ‘barely on the map’ to becoming a leader in green technology, which represents both ‘a wake-up call’ and an opportunity for California, a top state official said this week.”

In short, California sees China making the things, hears widespread if unsupportable rumors that they’re widely using the contraptions, as well, and embarks upon a double-whammy binge of mandating them and heavily subsidizing them.

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Boy Obama’s deep thinking on energy can get confusing, with yet another ‘green electricity’ plant, in Reno, for some reason serving as today’s backdrop for him to defend high gas prices. And, presumably, his continued wasting of your money on unsustainable, phony, if politically selected enterprises existing not for any reasons of their own merits but to satisfy politicians’ edicts.

This from a guy who previously talked about how now’s not the time to go to Vegas. The better analogy for what he’s doing with your money is going to a ring toss game. Run by Carnies.

But since someone obviously told him he didn’t do himself any favors by mocking that father of ten and telling him to go get the 2011 Unicorn hybrid van, prompting a softer effort to address the issue earlier in the week at Facebook, let’s follow his progression. First, the effort at rehabilitation following the recent sneering performance:

“Energy — we haven’t talked a lot about energy today, but first of all, $4-a-gallon gas really hurts a lot of people around this country.  It’s not because they’re wasteful, but if you’re driving 50 miles to work and that’s the only job you can find, and you can’t afford some hybrid so you’re stuck with the old beater that you’re driving around that gets eight miles a gallon, these gas prices are killing you right now.”

Lest we forget core beliefs amid the current rhetorical fog denying the president has anything to do with high gas prices, here’s Obama in 2008, on where things should be probably about ‘right now’.

So, gas prices should go up, but just gradually (people tend to notice when not too gradual, and call for crazy things like stopping your war on domestic production and domestic consumption).

But, does ‘gradual’ alter that “$4-a-gallon gas really hurts a lot of people”, climbing during a recession (or else, for the optimist, the weakest recovery on record)? Pish posh! There’s a fundamental transformation to take place!

Also so we do not forget, here is the man Obama interviewed, recruited and hired as Energy Secretary, and had in high level planning meetings so we assume he was just saying what they’re all thinking, on where things should be probably about ‘right now’:

“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

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By all means, let us pursue the president’s new approach to the budget, the Orwellian ‘reduce spending in the tax code’. But, wherever will we find good examples of wasteful ’spending in the tax code’?

Hey, look here! The Feds are taking your money to create 1,000 jobs! Of course, these jobs wouldn’t exist without this wealth transfer, and are mostly temporary anyway. But, still, it’s only $2 million per temporary job. Guess we’ll make the cost up in volume.

And T. Boone only wants a billion dollars. Then he promises to quit. Really. He’ll be the first.

The Nation also joins in:

[T]he primary problem facing clean alternative energy is the ‘price gap’—they are still more expensive than fossil fuels. As I’ve outlined in these pages previously (see “The Big Green Buy”), economies of scale, along with subsidies and planning, will help close this price gap. Only when clean technologies—like wind, solar, hydropower and electric vehicles—are cheaper than other options will global capitalism make the switch away from fossil fuels.

Of course, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind mostly doesn’t blow so windmills and solar panels require massive redundancy as well as enormous swathes of land, and wind- and solar-powered electricity are just as old as the coal-fired variety, just practical losers. Those are possibly greater challenges than a mere ‘price gap’, and indeed they make this idea of comparing renewables with hydrocarbons as if they were apples to apples endearingly absurd.

But, anyway. While ‘planning’ is euphemistic for preferences and mandates, here you also see green econ 101 amid the author’s ostentatious advertisement of having escaped brushing up on the actual experience and history of these boondoggles.

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Just as the discussion in Washington turns inescapably to reckless spending of the sort that earned Spain the title ‘The Next Greece’, President Obama goes to Pennsylvania today for an ‘energy town hall’ to promote policies he used to regularly admit he borrowed from Spain’s socialists. Yet these are policies Spain, Germany and the rest of his models are actually sprinting away from.

Specifically, the president will strike the ‘green jobs’ pose again at a plant owned by Spanish windmill producer Gamesa, rather incredibly reprising his cheerleading for this subsidy-dependent industry – all of whose manufacturing jobs will flee when the subsidies run out. That is, they are not – wait for it – ‘sustainable’.

So let’s review the unhappy history of the agenda and its talking points.

First, a sordid walk-through of the economic recklessness of this persistent, key component of ‘fundamentally transforming America’ is in my February testimony placed into the record by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which makes for some timely and fun reading.

Next, recall how deeply troubling this persistence is: the damage these policies wreak has been specifically, thoroughly and professionally exposed as regards the very countries Obama used to tell us to look because they were his models (Spain, Denmark, Germany; the sole exception not receiving the full review is Japan). He no longer cites them, obviously due to said exposés, but he still pushes the costly schemes. He knows, and cares not. That is disturbing.

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The Senate will, one presumes, finally vote either this week or next to block EPA from imposing President Obama’s ‘other way to skin the cat’ of Kyoto-style energy rationing, by using the Clean Air Act – a law that EPA’s own public filings inescapably acknowledge was never intended for such purpose. What will be at stake is little less than the rule of law itself.

Policy sanity also stands to take a beating, or else gain a new lease on life. The United States derives over 80% of its total energy from the three fossil fuels now being regulated by the Clean Air Act on the basis of EPA’s Endangerment Finding, which by design strangles our ability to use them.  Further, the Obama Administration has in effect decided that the EPA knows how to run the U. S. economy.

With über-green Germany, even nuke-happy France, appearing set to ramp up their coal use in the wake of Japan’s nuclear incident, the first rational response would be to call off EPA’s war on coal. Not to fight like mad to preserve and advance it.

But fight like mad to preserve and advance this war on coal is what the administration and its Senate enablers are doing.

And as George Mason University professor of science and public policy Thomas Lovejoy said in an astonishing admission to the Washington Post not long ago, in the context of this very Obama Power Grab:

“When Congress resists action on pressing environmental issues, regulation provides a way forward”.

Actually, no. Our Constitution – so quaint and outdated according to certain quarters though it may be (it’s still better than whatever it is we have today) – makes it quite plain that it is only when Congress decides to act that agencies have a way forward.

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Boy, them Googlers Act Fast.

Climate ’skeptic’ website ICECAP posted this item noting Google’s latest gambit in global warming activism, which includes bringing on board as an advisor an academic whose name and address pop up with some frequency in the ClimateGate emails.

Apparently in response, Google has flagged ICECAP’s website with this warning, discouraging traffic:

“This site may be compromised.“

ICECAP host Joe D’Aleo, the first meteorologist at the Weather Channel before that operation sold out to the alarmist industry, brought this to my attention and assures me this warning was not the case until now. He also attests that the site is not compromised. We just have a co-incidence of challenge followed by inaccuracy, is all.

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We have established that Obama’s war on coal assumed a massive, crash program of 100 new nuclear reactors — for optics purposes, keeping the cost of killing coal down, on paper — without which power the lights will necessarily go out. You cannot rule out half of our electricity supply and pretend otherwise.

Now that that binge is an even more obvious fiction, his defenders charge forth to say he does too support nuclear.

And they point to this recent statement. “Nuclear energy is an important part of our own energy future.”

Which does not say he will promote any new reactors, of course. Just that he knows he can’t shut down the existing fleet, additions to which have been stalled since 1978. Meanwhile he plans to add no coal, and shut down the existing coal fleet. Electricity, after all, comes from those holes in the wall.

Obama also said to Iowa voters in October 2008 that he was “not a proponent” of nukes, and it is unlikely that anything has changed his core position.

And in response to which rhetoric I also note that on Friday he said this: “First, we need to continue to boost domestic production of oil and gas.”

Ah. Yes. Of course we must. Please point to his record of trying to boost production again?

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Although usual suspects are now saying that the chain of events leading to Japan’s nuclear crisis is simply proof that we need to now rule out the last energy source that works, in terms of providing the necessary, base-load power required to run a modern society, it actually proves the opposite. With nuclear for all intents and purposes frozen in amber — as if it wasn’t already, talk of a ‘renaissance’ notwithstanding — this, combined with the Left’s war on energy that works now places us on the precipice, as well.

Will Obama admit that he must immediately cease his war to kill coal, which is a stepping stone on their war to also strangle gas? (all of which was detailed here, ten months, early, I suppose)

Of course not. Will someone, possibly an aspiring president, call him out on it?

After all: his war on coal assumed an unprecedented binge of 100 new nuclear ractors here.

That was facially absurd at the time — “at this rate”, as the greens like to say, we’ll add 100 new reactors as the new millenium approaches — but it is inescapably reckless now. They must be forced to cop to it. And do the responsible thing.

That’s not exactly how things are playing out. Congress is moving to stop Obama’s EPA from the centerpiece of its ‘energy plan’, which is to regulate its war on coal-fired electricity that they were unable to legislate. And the administration reflexively joined the demagoguery of that responsible move, the necessity of which has now only proved more obvious.

But that EPA backdoor global warming scheme is, just like the failed cap-and-trade legislation, premised on a fantasy economic assumption (100 new reactors) to dumb-down the cost of regulating coal out of existence (‘bankrupting’ anyone who wanted to try and use it, in Obama’s own phrase to the SF Chronicle ed board). In fact, this was built in purely to have a piece of paper to wave around and say see this is completely different than the plan that candidate Obama said would cause your rates to necessarily skyrocket, and bankrupt anyone daring to use coal! Not honest.

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It may just be wishful thinking but Politico’s ‘Morning Energy’ today was dropping heavy hints they expected President Obama to use this morning’s presser to defend against any culpability of his policies in ’skyrocketing’ gas prices.

Yeah, any such connection between Obama policies and energy prices is a pretty hard case to make, what with the Obama administration having immediately upon taking office canceled oil and gas leases, placed more areas off limits for domestic exploration and production, changing the Minerals Management Service to an offshore windmill permitting agency since all we need is some offshore windmills (not one but two senior administration officials have said this, including a cabinet secretary), then not letting the Gulf spill ‘go to waste’ by seizing it to strangle our biggest domestic source of oil.

Of course, there is also that long trail of aspirational comments, well beyond vowing to cause electricity prices to ’skyrocket’, indicating this steady gas price hike is their objective, even if overseas developments are causing problems for them [helping the rise advance too quickly such that people pay attention, with these developments adding to the price hikes the admin have built in, with much more obviously undone but hopefully on the way]. As I detailed with many more admissions ten months ago in Power Grab.

Obviously, this is one of the items worrying Team Obama, along with their foreign policy fecklessness. And — in lieu of gimmickry to redirect voters’ gazes from policies that contribute to this, such as by releasing Strategic [NB: not 'Political'] Petroleum Reserve crude — Obama cheerleaders (like Politico) note he could take the opportunity to push his “Clean Energy Standard”.

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So Al Gore has come around on the policy cancer that is ethanol, even as Newt Gingrich decides that telling the truth on this would be politically inconvenient. Yet the great strategist Mr. Gingrich does not see that support for ethanol leaves him completely unable to speak the truth about the booming wind and solar debacles threatening to expand this economic black hole even wider.

That is, unless he wants to look like a certain other candidate defending his own state version of ObamaCare while decrying Obamacare. Not pretty, not conducive to attracting voters.

As Congress considers the booming debt and which programs to nibble at for meager reductions, possibly they should heed Gore’s complaint: “It is not good to have these massive subsidies.”

True. And Gore even specifically noted ‘for first generation’ ideas like corn squeezins. But big ol’ subsidies make even less sense for fully mature technologies, like wind, whose electricity was commercialized 120 years ago (despite the mysticism, romanticism and silly talk of ‘new technology’ shrouding windmills, they’re creaky technology for which any improvements will be at the margins of efficiency. It’s a windmill.)

And now guess what? Windmills have surpassed ethanol’s pocket-pickery.

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

To support this move, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, via its subcommittee chaired by the politically candid Bernard Sanders, will hold a hearing this afternoon touting ‘Green Jobs and Trade’.

After I was first contacted about testifying I prepared remarks which, though I am not appearing, I have submitted. Someone has to say these things before we triple- or quadruple-down on the ethanol debacle, a mess from which we are unlikely to extricate ourselves even after the harm becomes known. That’s what creating then richly feeding constituencies will do.

Below is a truncated version of points made in the opening and first section, ‘China Syndrome’ (with citations omitted). The remarks include other sections — Not ‘New’, Not of ‘the Future’; Green ‘Census’ Jobs and the Green-Jobs Bubble; The German Model; The Broader European Experience; Spain; Expensive Waste; and an appendix of Recent Developments in Other EU “Green Economy” Programs — all of which you can read here:

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