“AWEA’s job figures, dating back to at least 2009, may be nothing more than figures pulled from thin air.”

The numero uno goal of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) is extending the Production Tax Credit (PTC) beyond its current expiration date of December 31, 2012. Documents available on the trade group’s website show that about $4 million of AWEA’s 2012 budget ($30 million) was directed toward PTC lobbying.

With job growth the top political issue in this election season, AWEA’s strategic plan calls for rebranding of the wind industry as an economic engine that will produce steady job growth, particularly in the manufacturing sector. But therein lies a problem: the wind industry’s own record on job growth lacks credibility.

Public information suggests that AWEA has inflated its overall job numbers.…

“When government undertakes tasks for which it is ill equipped it squanders the authority necessary for carrying out its core responsibilities. Pervasive rent-seeking, bad for our economy and worse for our republic, should be discouraged instead of rewarded. If government becomes integral to securing every advantage and assuaging every grievance, then governance becomes impossible.”

– Richard Voegeli, “Reclaiming Democratic Capitalism,” Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2012, p. 46.

Governments around the world are having buyers’ remorse with their bets that solar and wind could effectively diminish oil, gas, coal, and nuclear. So much cost, so little energy. So much cost, so little reliability, and so much need for backup power.

The story is the same for the U.S. Department of Energy. The Obama administration’s rocky road with green-energy boosterism is no secret.…

“For many American families, struggling to make ends meet in the jobless recovery, energy development is an answer to a prayer. The fact that the oil and gas boom has been done without taxpayer subsidies—and despite reactionary public policies at the federal level and in some states (such as New York)—means that more economic opportunity is on tap.”

In this so-called “jobless” recovery, aka the Great Recession, an estimated 20 million American workers are unemployed or underemployed. One out of every two college students cannot find work in their chosen fields. Competition for well-paying jobs is likely to become even tougher when thousands of men and women in uniform return home from Afghanistan and look for ways to support their families.

Although many U.S. industries have been reluctant to hire new workers due to political and economic uncertainty, the oil and natural gas industry is booming worldwide.…

 “In inspiring words, the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence insisted that each man should be considered as owning himself, and not be viewed as the property of the state to be manipulated by either king or Parliament.”

The Declaration of Independence, signed by members of the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, is the founding document of the American experiment in free government. This is well taught and known.

But what is too often forgotten is that the Founding Fathers’s Declaration argued against the heavy and intrusive hand of big government. And it true today when dissident groups invoke the memory of the revolutionary period to call for political change anew.

For … and Against

Most Americans easily recall those eloquent words with which the Founding Fathers expressed the basis of their claim for independence from Great Britain in 1776:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.