The American Spectator

So, both Spain and the City of Los Angeles are teetering on bankruptcy, and it’s apparent to anyone who examines the matter that a key component of their looming failures is the same suite of “green energy”/”green jobs” policies that President Obama vows to impose upon us.

I point out some unfolding Spanish realities here today. The Wall Street Journal noted “L.A.’s ‘Global Warning’”, here.

In short, and as you can read in detail in “Power Grab”, on at least eight occasions as candidate and president, Barack Obama offered some variation of a line in his “green” stump speech to “think about what’s happening in countries like Spain, and Germany”. There he set forth the models for his own “green jobs” schemes which happen to strongly resemble the renewable energy mandates that have left Los Angeles on the verge of financial crisis.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is trying to figure out how to get floor action on imposing a national equivalent of these debacles, to “conference” with the House’s Waxman-Markey debacle. All signs are that President Obama and the Democrat leadership plan to repeat their by-whatever-means-necessary approach to achieve this longstanding box on the Left’s checklist.

This would be a horrible mistake, as I detail in “Power Grab”.

About that Germany thing: Experts with the well-established, state-funded think tank Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung concluded, in assessing that country’s experience, that even after the past decade’s wind and solar energy subsidies of more than $100 billion (USD), their solar (for lack of a better word) “industry” still depends upon financial support at levels more than eight times higher than the wholesale electricity price and more than four times the support provided to producers of wind electricity; government aid for wind power is now three times the cost of conventional electricity; and financial aid to Germany’s solar industry has now reached a level that far exceeds average wages, with per worker subsidies as high as $240,000 US.

On the heels of the “stimulus” boondoggle of hundreds of thousands of dollars to subsidize each mostly temporary, and often illusory job, it is inescapable not only that we cannot afford this but also that we have been thoroughly forewarned. Spain and Los Angeles are only the first canaries to keel over.