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 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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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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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 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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Last week President Obama began the blitz which, barring Republican collapse (read on) could last for the next two years, pushing his State of the Union call for American taxpayers to hand over even more billions to underwrite a supposed ‘clean energy’ future.

By chance, I read of this between sessions conferring in London and Brussels with leading experts on the disastrous folly of Europe’s experiment with the ‘clean energy economy’. We know that this is the same disaster that President Obama is now doubling down on as an economic recovery plan because he used to admit as much.

But in his new push the president has toned down the European roots of his model, as well as the planetary salvation rationale for energy rationing. This is because, respectively, the success stories all proved to be black holes which European governments are now trying to walk back, and the public turned against the global warming campaign.

So it was with great amusement that I caught, on my flight back this weekend, some art imitating life in a spectacularly appropriate way. Accountant Leo Bloom revealed to producer Max Bialystock, “under the right circumstances, a producer could actually make more money with a flop than he can with a hit”. Voila! There you have, in a Broadway second, President Obama’s ‘clean energy’ agenda.

Government Electric – once a bastion of American genius now fallen to being no more than a government front company – and the rest of the ‘renewables’ Music Men (to note another apt vehicle) are the Bialystock and Bloom of policy. They seek to make their fortune by producing flops. But since their ‘markets’ are arranged by pals in government and not due to performance, it works. That’s the beauty of it.

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To rephrase President Obama’s State of the Union theme:  “This is our generation’s apparatchik moment.”

Yes, he said “Sputnik” instead, but his actual agenda is about the apparatchik—government by party leaders, bureaucrats and the well-connected.

His agenda is symbolized by his push for “green jobs” as the path to a better future.

Simply put, the green jobs agenda spends billions of taxpayer dollars to destroy existing jobs and replace them with jobs in politically-favored businesses, raising the costs of energy along the way.

The politically-connected win.  Existing job-holders and companies lose.  Home electric bills go up.  Power also costs more for companies, making it more expensive to go into business or to stay in business.

It’s cronyism that is building a political power structure based on false claims about clean green jobs.

It’s economic cannibalism because creating the green jobs requires killing off existing jobs.

As Bloomberg News reported, “Subsidizing renewable energy in the U.S. may destroy two jobs for every one created if Spain’s experience with windmills and solar farms is any guide.”

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The anti-energy lobby, surrogates for Big Wind and Big Solar, is now backed into a rhetorical corner in its effort to impose its agenda of protecting the world from the horrors of affordable, abundant energy. Remember, although they say their objective is to use policy to force invention of Flubber or pixie dust to satisfy our future energy abundance, this doesn’t square with their decades of saying that “If  you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it” (green Energy guru Amory Lovins).

Or that it would be “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child” (green leader, Paul Ehrlich), that “It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet” (Eco-writer Jeremy Rifkin). That’s what drives them. They want you limited to stuff that doesn’t and won’t work because it doesn’t and won’t work. But to get you there they swear it will. Despite saying for decades that would actually be their worst nightmare.

You figure out which of their stated positions is the lie. I’ll wait.

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I just had forwarded to me an email written by ThirdWay.org calling for more federal intervention in the energy markets, further supporting politically deigned winners from the pool of losers that must petition for aid in order to exist. Which of course doesn’t read all that differently than the old, First Way (post-FDR, that is). But it’s got a Blair-ite marketing panache that’s worth a try, anyway.

This was noteworthy for a couple of reasons, including its acknowledgment that the renewable energy mandate you will soon hear very much about, as the next ‘other way to skin the cat’ of energy rationing, is so far as your wallet is concerned the same as the very cap-and-trade scheme for which it is Plan B:

“China is about to [sic] put a price on carbon. The UK and EU are already there. So how can the U.S. begin to compete for the $2 trillion clean energy market? …We can help do that by establishing a national clean energy standard.”

Windmill mandate equals cap-and-trade. According to its champions. Got it.

More eye-catching was the whole $2 trillion thing. Because also today per Greenwire (subscription required) Sen. John Kerry continued his silly (very silly) advocacy of this agenda — if in less humorous fashion, seeking to take advantage of tragedy for political aims: “Infrastructure, clean energy can unite Congress after Tucson tragedy — Kerry” (noting that, hey, Cong. Giffords was really big on renewable energy supports, so…).

He “call[ed] for renewed support for investment in the energy economy — especially ‘green energy’ — where the United States, he said, is losing its competitive edge in a $6 trillion market to the rest of the world and China in particular “.

Is Sen. Kerry saying, as this reporter implies, that the renewable energy market is $6 trillion? Exaggeration in support of the green agenda? Quelle horreur, Sen. Kerry! (more…)

So President Obama decided to engage in some high-profile symbolism and re-install solar panels on the White House roof (what, no windmill?), a la Jimmy Carter, and in an embarrassing reversal. Although the clumsiness of an obvious political- and panic-driven pander has caused heartburn on the Left, in a related reversal, Obama also used his weekly address to revive the risible and previously ditched claim that Germany is proof of a state successfully centrally planning the ‘green economy’.

Not to leave their man in Washington hanging, if by sheer coincidence, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology bought a full page ad in the weekend Wall Street Journal to further promote Obama’s plan of the U.S. adopting economically painful, environmentally meaningless ‘green economy’ laws designed to increase your electricity (and other energy) costs.

It’s almost like they are telling us to watch out for the lame-duck session.

Clumsy and unseemly though it may be, there’s also the little problem with a lack of accuracy.

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So Senate Democrats failed again to pass a measure to halt “offshoring” of jobs, meaning employing people overseas either directly or indirectly. They oppose that but, looking at the elements of the (fortunately) languishing “Creating American Jobs and Ending Offshoring Act“, offshoring includes investing overseas in any number of circumstances. What should trouble responsible policymakers is that which prompts companies to actually “offshore” jobs when, all other things being equal, the U.S. was as rational a location for the investment as other options.

This of course is the ever-expanding regulatory state, which makes other places more attractive options for growth or even continuing investments here and which, oddly enough, the Dems embrace. Like grim death.

Even more absurd is the Democrats’ simultaneous obsession with the latest excuses for massively expanding the state, thereby offshoring jobs. These include President Obama’s ‘green economy’. The job-killing nature of this enterprise escapes Democrats. They speak as if they actually believe that mandating you use all sorts of politically divined things, like windmills and solar panels, means that surely they’ll be made here, too. Except that they will be made in those places that don’t lard on such mandates. China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia are a few countries that come to mind as places that have so far ended up manufacturing the green gadgets forced on us by our political class vapidly boasting of the jobs that such mandates will create.

That these jobs will be created elsewhere — followed by many others, incidentally, for the same reason: such mandates result in much manufacturing becoming uneconomic — is the most foreseeable outcome in the world, even if it’s always reported in terms, when it occurs, of somehow being an unforeseen consequence.

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While Harry Reid may have allowed the energy tax hikes to die on the floor of the Senate, liberals nationwide have continued their attacks on the energy industry. The Gulf oil spill is barely a fond memory of a moratorium and Democrats are already seizing on the incident to push a host of job-killing, industry-kneecapping taxes and regulations designed to do what they failed to do legislatively: take down the American energy industry.

First the regulations: starting in January, the EPA will begin enforcing a little known provision called the “Tailoring Rule” – a new series of regulations that allow the EPA to dole out permits to carbon-generating companies “allowing” them to pollute in certain amounts, strictly regulated by environmental watchdogs. These regulations don’t just touch the usual suspects, but also renewable energy sources that don’t immediately fall into the “green” category as defined by environmental groups – sources like Maine’s biomass industry, which creates usable energy from environmental waste. Under the EPA regulations, the biomass industry, which was viewed – and treated – up until now, as carbon neutral, would face a host of regulations directed at greenhouse gas producers – regulations that would greatly raise the cost of doing business and could have dire economic consequences for Maine and beyond.

And then there’s the taxes.

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The news about China overtaking Japan as the world’s second-largest economy is actually quite relevant to the US climate and energy policy debate, which promises to continue despite the scientific scandal and evaporation of political will to associate with a “global warming” or cap-and-trade legislation.

Thanks to a poll by Stanley Greenberg, the measure has been re-branded as “green economy” and “clean energy”.  But whatever you call it, and lame duck or otherwise, this latest excuse for central planning will be with us until it is unavoidably tied to serious political costs, like its forerunner the 1993 BTU energy tax, which according to Al Gore in a 2006 interview with the Financial Times led to the Democrat’s loss of Congress. Instructively, that experience originally prompted the re-branding to cap-and-trade.

Now, about  the relatively fading Japan, it is important to note that although it has been a persistent economic basket case, it nonetheless serves as one of President Obama’s models for stimulating an economy with “renewable energy” mandates (as we’ve documented in this space on numerous occasions, he’s not always the best-informed about these matters).

China’s relevance to our current policy debate is in part due to the ritual “but, China’s doing it…” line of — for lack of a better word — “argument” for why the US should impose all manner of global warming policies on itself. That deserves scrutiny.

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National Journal ran a piece yesterday (behind a paywall) by the German Marshall Fund’s Bruce Stokes, making the arguments that will be ratcheted up in the Senate beginning on Monday in favor of mandating windmills and solar panels: if we don’t mandate them, we not only won’t be using them but we won’t be making them either! This dire situation will leave the Chinese only themselves to sell the things to. Carry the one and you see how that harms our competitiveness.

Where to begin? At the root of this ritual case is a strange notion that being a leader in something – here, it’s windmills or solar panels – is intrinsically a desirable end. As I discuss in “Power Grab”: if we’re not the world’s windmill king…so what? It’s a windmill. It is not, as President Obama said, a new technology”, one of his rhetorical repetitions the curiosity of which should require no elaboration. Windmills are not a strategic industry. We have centuries of fossil fuels.

And after all this time windmills have come about as far as they can and will come with the possible exceptions of improvements in efficiency at the margins(solar is spectacularly worse). The laws of physics will not be repealed, the wind cannot be made to blow any more or regularly, and you will not decrease the host of very troubling NIMBY and other issues elaborated here by George Will.

Even rabid demander of such mandates, Obama’s Science Czar” (and population nut) John Holdren implicitly acknowledges the falsehood of the sales pitch that we can replace energy sources that work with windmills and solar panels. This leaves us with the principal argument in favor of these costly schemes, reported by E&E News last week as even acknowledged by Brookings Institute economist Adele Morris, as “the immediate need to reduce emissions”.

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Now that most of twelve California wind turbines retrofitted for Minnesota winters are finally operational, several cities have acknowledged to the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota that the $5 million project may be more suited for generating PR—both good and bad—than producing significant quantities of power.

The wind power project involves utilities in eleven cities scattered across the state from the metro area to East Grand Forks in a consortium called the Minnesota Municipal Power Agency (MMPA). Each of the eleven member cities received one turbine, and the twelfth was given to the MMPA owned and operated Faribault Energy Park in Faribault. It was supposed to be a step toward meeting the state renewable energy mandate that requires 25 percent of Minnesota’s power be from renewable energy sources by 2025.

It turns out, however, the twelve wind derricks will produce power for perhaps several hundred homes, hardly making a dent in the MMPA’s 57,000 household and business customers.

“They’re basically for public relations, educational purposes. They’re just not feasible for any significant amount of electrical generation,” said Dan Voss, Municipal Utilities Director for the City of Anoka.

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So, China went big into windmill and solar panel production, causing the media and other liberals to breathlessly swoon over this further evidence of the wisdom of us mandating the things even though all it proves is that China is not dumb.

Rich countries say all weather is now their fault and vow to spend billions on uneconomic, inefficient and intermittent energy sources regardless of their merits or performance as penance and to show their seriousness of purpose in feeling really, really bad about the whole thing they alone talked themselves into. China volunteers to make the machines for us because, without absurd “green” policies of the sort causing energy prices to rise so high that seniors burn books to stay warm — in fact, China rejects the Kyoto agenda precisely because it has sworn off of that sort of poverty and knows what would keep them there — they can do it more cheaply.

And then they go to Copenhagen and hold us up for billions in new, “climate aid”, with more than a whiff of reparations about it because, after all, our government aided and abetted that line of argument.

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Does the government’s power of eminent domain include seizing the rights to the wind that wafts over your property? That’s the controversial question swirling around an 8 megawatt wind farm proposed by the southern Minnesota city of New Ulm and opposed by several farmers in rural Lafayette Township who refuse to grant their “wind rights” to the city utility.

“This is merely an evolution of principles that have been evolving since the sovereign rights of eminent domain were determined to exist,” according to Hugh Nierengarten, New Ulm City Attorney.

“Eminent domain is basically like a nuclear bomb,” said Clete Goblirsch, a farmer who refuses to sign an easement. “The repercussions would be long lasting and widespread, not just for us, but for the wind industry.”

While public utilities have fairly broad powers to use government authority to force property owners to sell to meet their needs, the New Ulm plan involves an unprecedented move to expand eminent domain authority to include the seizure of air space on private property for power generation.

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Sens. John Kerry and Lindsey Graham had a piece Sunday in the New York Times, stumbling through a pro-cap-and-trade routine. Initial thoughts on this homage to the bipartisanship fetish:

The “we even have different accents” bit tips their hand that the argument is as substantive as those Gore-group ads with Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson on a couch together. Not a bad parallel actually, though I can’t help but recall this far more entertaining version of the labored intro.

When one feels compelled to give six reasons why we ought to embrace their idea, you know they aren’t persuaded themselves with the “global warming” argument, and see little persuasive opportunity in it.

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