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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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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