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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So, if you had any qualms with this article headlined on Drudge as “ GOLDMAN reveals where bailout cash went — overseas banks!“, you might want to check out this one in today’s Environment & Energy Daily (subscription required):

CLIMATE: Lawmakers to ponder U.S. aid commitments without cap-and-trade revenue

With prospects for a broad climate bill nearly dead this year, a House Foreign Affairs subpanel will meet tomorrow to probe how the United States can honor its climate finance commitments to the developing world without cap-and-trade revenue…

The world’s wealthy nations, including the United States, have pledged to raise $100 billion a year by 2020 for climate aid to low-emitting impoverished countries that, through one of climate change’s cruelest twists, are among the most vulnerable to the drought and floods that will accompany global warming.

That pledge, which includes $30 billion in quick-start funding over the next three years, was one of the most tangible successes of last December’s U.N. climate summit. The deal was critical in winning over many developing nations to sign onto the Copenhagen Accord, sparing the United Nations and President Obama a total fiasco in Denmark.

However, how this money will be raised remains very much in doubt in the United States, especially with the failure this year of comprehensive climate legislation. Both the House’s Waxman-Markey bill and the Senate’s Kerry-Lieberman bill shunted portions of their cap-and-trade revenue toward international climate aid.

Without this money, it will be extremely difficult to raise significant climate funds, wrote Michael Levi, senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, on his blog.

“Raising [the funds] without cap-and-trade will almost certainly be impossible,” he wrote. “If others conclude from the current debacle that cap-and-trade is permanently dead in the United States, Washington will be in for a rough ride at the climate talks in Cancun in December.”

Oh. Well. We wouldn’t want that. If we can avoid people being mean to the State Department because those stingy American taxpayers won’t give them enough money, we should, at (apparently) all costs.

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All across this nation, families and businesses are struggling to make ends meet. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs and many more worry that they will be next. But Americans are meeting these times with courage and by putting first things first, at least everywhere but the White House.

It is astonishing that in the midst of the worst recession in 26 years, this administration and Democrat leaders continue to advance job-killing proposals like the national energy tax and will carry that message to the global warming convention in Copenhagen.

Rather than making a priority of creating jobs, the president plans to attend negotiations at the United Nation’s convention on climate change in Denmark. This decision is wrong on several levels. The administration’s participation in the Copenhagen negotiations raises a number of concerns that the president should address before catching his flight.

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