A recent story (http://liberty.pacificresearch.org/blog/sid.green-jobs) notes layoffs in the renewable energy business and laments the oft-heard call for expenditures on ‘green jobs’.  The author notes the potential ‘explosion’  in clean jobs, but also the wasteful practice of low productivity investment.  Solar power especially is very expensive and hardly a cost-effective way to spend taxpayer or consumer money.

Amazingly, a number of Congressional leaders such as Harry Reid and Bernie Sanders point to the struggles the public has had with higher energy costs, and then turn to renewable energy as a solution, without mentioning its (higher) cost.  This is rather like Marie Antoinette’s supposed comment that the poor who had no bread should eat cake.  Arguing for ‘clean’ energy over ‘dirty’ energy is one thing, but proposing to solve the problem of expensive energy with even more expensive (but ostensibly cleaner) energy is at best disingenuous.…