Earth Hour wastes energy and harms the planet.  Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish academic and environmental writer, recently lambasted Earth Hour, the annual tradition of turning off the lights, which falls on March 23:

In fact, Earth Hour will cause emissions to increase. As the United Kingdom’s National Grid operators have found, a small decline in electricity consumption does not translate into less energy being pumped into the grid, and therefore will not reduce emissions. Moreover, during Earth Hour, any significant drop in electricity demand will entail a reduction in CO2 emissions during the hour, but it will be offset by the surge from firing up coal or gas stations to restore electricity supplies afterwards.

And the cozy candles that many participants will light, which seem so natural and environmentally friendly, are still fossil fuels – and almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light bulbs. Using one candle for each switched-off bulb cancels out even the theoretical CO2 reduction; using two candles means that you emit more CO2.

To some self-styled environmentalists and bureaucrats, symbolism is more important than reality.  The Environmental Protection Agency clings to ethanol mandates, imposing them despite growing evidence that they increase world hunger and mortality, and harm the environment.  As the Wall Street Journal noted, in October 2011,

the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Action Aid petitioned the EPA to review the so-called renewable fuel standard that mandates that 13.8 billion gallons of corn ethanol be blended into the gasoline supply next year. The free-market think tank and global hunger charity argued that the EPA’s technical regulations implementing the mandate did not meet “basic standards of quality” [since] EPA failed to consider multiple peer-reviewed studies documenting the link between ethanol and world hunger in its public health literature review, as required by law. That includes one paper that concludes that biofuel mandates are responsible for at least 192,000 premature deaths every year. Overall more people die from chronic hunger world-wide than malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS combined.

EPA disregarded this evidence, and denied the petition after a fourteenth-month delay.  (A request for reconsideration has been filed).

In 2008, a Washington Post editorial by two prominent environmentalists described how ethanol mandates have harmed the environment and spawned hunger across the world.   In “Ethanol’s Failed Promise,” Lester Pearson and Jonathan Lewis observed that “Turning one-fourth of our corn into fuel is affecting global food prices. U.S. food prices are rising at twice the rate of inflation, hitting the pocketbooks of lower-income Americans and people living on fixed incomes.  .  .Deadly food riots have broken out in dozens of nations in the past few months, most recently in Haiti and Egypt. World Bank President Robert Zoellick warns of a global food emergency.”

Moreover, they noted,

food-to-fuel mandates are leading to increased environmental damage. First, producing ethanol requires huge amounts of energy — most of which comes from coal. Second, the production process creates a number of hazardous byproducts. . .Third, food-to-fuel mandates are helping drive up the price of agricultural staples, leading to significant changes in land use with major environmental harm. Here in the United States, farmers are pulling land out of the federal conservation program, threatening fragile habitats. . .Most troubling, though, is that the higher food prices caused in large part by food-to-fuel mandates create incentives for global deforestation, including in the Amazon basin. As Time Magazine reported this month, huge swaths of forest are being cleared for agricultural development. The result is devastating: We lose an ecological treasure and critical habitat for endangered species, as well as the world’s largest ‘carbon sink.’ And when the forests are cleared and the land plowed for farming, the carbon that had been sequestered in the plants and soil is released. Princeton scholar Tim Searchinger has modeled this impact and reports in Science magazine that the net impact of the food-to-fuel push will be an increase in global carbon emissions — and thus a catalyst for climate change.

In Human Events, Deroy Murdock chronicled how rising food prices resulting from ethanol forced starving Haitians to literally eat dirt (dirt cookies made of vegetable oil, salt, and dirt), and fueled violent protests in unstable “powder kegs” like Pakistan and Egypt.  More recently, biofuel mandates have fueled hunger and malnutrition in Guatemala.

The Obama Administration has forced up the ethanol content of gasoline, heedless of the fact that ethanol makes gas costlier and dirtier, increases ozone pollution, and increases the death toll from smog and air pollution. Ethanol mandates also result in deforestation, soil erosion, and water pollution.  By driving up food prices, they have fueled Islamic extremism in Afghanistan, Egypt, Yemen and other poor countries in the Middle East. The Obama Administration persists in supporting ethanol mandates despite widespread criticism from experts across the political spectrum.

On Sunday, the New York Times ran a story about how ethanol mandates are driving up child malnutrition and hunger in Guatemala.  That country now has the fourth-highest rate of child malnutrition in the entire world (higher than in most war-torn African countries):

With its corn-based diet and proximity to the United States, Central America has long been vulnerable to economic riptides related to the United States’ corn policy. Now that the United States is using 40 percent of its crop to make biofuel, it is not surprising that tortilla prices have doubled in Guatemala, which imports nearly half of its corn.

In a country where most families must spend about two thirds of their income on food, ‘the average Guatemalan is now hungrier because of biofuel development.’. . .Roughly 50 percent of the nation’s children are chronically malnourished, the fourth-highest rate in the world, according to the United Nations.

The American renewable fuel standard mandates that an increasing volume of biofuel be blended into the nation’s vehicle fuel supply each year to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and to bolster the nation’s energy security. Similarly, by 2020, transportation fuels in Europe will have to contain 10 percent biofuel.

Ethanol and biofuel mandates have shrunk the amount of land used for producing food in countries like Guatemala:

Recent laws in the United States and Europe that mandate the increasing use of biofuel in cars have had far-flung ripple effects, economists say, as land once devoted to growing food for humans is now sometimes more profitably used for churning out vehicle fuel.  In a globalized world, the expansion of the biofuels industry has contributed to spikes in food prices and a shortage of land for food-based agriculture in poor corners of Asia, Africa and Latin America because the raw material is grown wherever it is cheapest.

Many small farmers in Guatemala have been displaced, leaving their children hungry and physically stunted:

in rural areas, subsistence farmers struggle to find a place to sow their seeds. On a recent morning, José Antonio Alvarado was harvesting his corn crop on the narrow median of Highway 2 as trucks zoomed by.  “We’re farming here because there is no other land, and I have to feed my family,” said Mr. Alvarado, pointing to his sons Alejandro and José, who are 4 and 6 but appear to be much younger, a sign of chronic malnutrition.

In 2008, a Washington Post editorial by two prominent environmentalists described how ethanol mandates have harmed the environment and spawned hunger across the world.   In “Ethanol’s Failed Promise,” Lester Pearson and Jonathan Lewis observed that “Turning one-fourth of our corn into fuel is affecting global food prices. U.S. food prices are rising at twice the rate of inflation, hitting the pocketbooks of lower-income Americans and people living on fixed incomes.  .  .Deadly food riots have broken out in dozens of nations in the past few months, most recently in Haiti and Egypt. World Bank President Robert Zoellick warns of a global food emergency.” Moreover, they noted,

food-to-fuel mandates are leading to increased environmental damage. First, producing ethanol requires huge amounts of energy — most of which comes from coal. Second, the production process creates a number of hazardous byproducts. . .Third, food-to-fuel mandates are helping drive up the price of agricultural staples, leading to significant changes in land use with major environmental harm. Here in the United States, farmers are pulling land out of the federal conservation program, threatening fragile habitats. . .Most troubling, though, is that the higher food prices caused in large part by food-to-fuel mandates create incentives for global deforestation, including in the Amazon basin. As Time Magazine reported this month, huge swaths of forest are being cleared for agricultural development. The result is devastating: We lose an ecological treasure and critical habitat for endangered species, as well as the world’s largest ‘carbon sink.’ And when the forests are cleared and the land plowed for farming, the carbon that had been sequestered in the plants and soil is released. Princeton scholar Tim Searchinger has modeled this impact and reports in Science magazine that the net impact of the food-to-fuel push will be an increase in global carbon emissions — and thus a catalyst for climate change.

In Human Events, Deroy Murdock chronicled how rising food prices resulting from ethanol forced starving Haitians to literally eat dirt (dirt cookies made of vegetable oil, salt, and dirt), and fueled violent protests in unstable “powder kegs” like Pakistan and Egypt.

The Obama Administration has forced up the ethanol content of gasoline, heedless of the fact that ethanol makes gas costlier and dirtier, increases ozone pollution, and increases the death toll from smog and air pollution. Ethanol mandates also result in deforestation, soil erosion, and water pollution.  By driving up food prices, they have fueled Islamic extremism in Afghanistan, Egypt, Yemen and other poor countries in the Middle East.

The Obama Administration persists in supporting ethanol mandates despite widespread criticism from experts across the political spectrum.  The legislation in Congress that it backed in the name of fighting global warming contained ethanol subsidies, even though ethanol subsidies have been linked to famine, hunger, food riots, and political unrest in poor countries.  That “cap-and-trade” legislation contained so many special-interest giveaways that it would have fleeced American consumers without helping the environment, even while driving industry overseas to countries with less environmental protections.  (In 2008, Obama admitted that “under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”)

This September, the “EPA honored Hispanic Heritage Month by promoting a Marxist mass murderer,” Che Guevara, who killed many Hispanics. Che Guevara was the Cuban “revolutionary” and henchman of Fidel Castro. Guevara murdered children and political dissidents and imprisoned suspected homosexuals in labor camps, and called himself “Stalin II” (after Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator who tortured, murdered and starved to death more than 20 million people, especially ethnic minorities, like Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and Crimean Tatars). What’s next? Will the Education Department celebrate the bloodthirsty African dictator Idi Amin, who killed more than 300,000 Ugandans, as part of Black History Month? (Under the Obama administration, the Education Department has shown contempt for civil liberties like due process and free speech.)

As Buzzfeed noted at the time:

The Environmental Protection Agency commemorated the start of Hispanic Heritage Month with a picture of Che Guevara and a bit of plagiarism. An internal email . . .  distributed to agency employees . . . this Saturday, featured [an] image of a horse and buggy passing a billboard of the Marxist revolutionary, in addition to a listing of facts about Hispanic culture. . .that text and the photo appear to be lifted word-for-word and without attribution from the website Buzzle.com.

The EPA doesn’t just celebrate killers.  It also kills jobs.  NFIB lists the “EPA’s top 5 job killers,” recent rules that will wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs, and likely cost over $1 trillion.  Some of the most costly new regulations will have no discernible public health benefit at all.

It’s not just businesses and workers that will suffer under Obama Administration policies, but also consumers.  Obama earlier admitted that “under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

If you restrict the supply of something, the price will go up.  It’s one of the laws of supply and demand.  Thus, cap-and-trade energy rationing schemes drive the price of energy up, by capping the supply.  President Obama has conceded that in his unguarded moments.  In a January 17, 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Obama said that “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” under his cap-and-trade plan to fight global warming.  He also said that under his plan, “if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them.”

But journalists are not economists, and often have difficulty understanding the most basic principles of economics.  (Some cannot even do basic math).  What is clear to any economist or any college graduate who has taken Econ 101 seems disputed or unclear to many journalists, who are more familiar with trendy fads in college English Departments, and left-wing critical race theory, than they are with basic economic truths.

So it is that PolitiFact Virginia erroneously rated as “mostly false” the claim that cap-and-trade would naturally lead to “higher” energy bills for Virginia households.  It admitted that “analyses of two measures that have been before in Congress in recent years concluded that cap-and-trade carries a cost for most consumers,” but then claimed that such costs could somehow be offset, even while capping energy use, and result in “an average lower cost for consumers.”  While their effects on the environment may be disputed, it is clear that they raise energy costs for consumers by reducing the supply of energy.  (As a CBS analyst once noted, a Treasury Department analysis pegged the cost of the Obama Administration’s cap-and-trade plan at $1761 per year per American household).

Whatever their theoretical merits, cap-and-trade schemes tend to become vehicles for vast amounts of corporate welfare and special-interest pork by the politicians who craft them, like the Congressional cap-and-trade energy bill backed by the Obama Administration.  That Obama-backed bill contained so many special-interest giveaways that it would have fleeced American consumers without helping the environment, as I explained earlier (it contained environmentally-harmful ethanol subsidies and could have driven industry overseas to countries with less environmental protections).

As Professor Glenn Reynolds notes, if you want to cut carbon emissions, you should eliminate regulatory obstacles to fracking, since fracking cuts carbon emissions far more than costly cap-and-trade regulations do.  By expanding access to clean natural gas, fracking is helping reduce both greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. As Walter Russell Mead notes at The American Interest, “fracking is doing more to control carbon emissions than all the efforts of all the greens in the world. And by promoting American (and Chinese!) domestic energy production, it is doing more to lay the foundations of world peace than all the peace activists and disarmament campaigners in the world.” Fracking has “driven a natural gas boom in this country and dramatically cut the cost of the cleanest hydrocarbon energy source of them all,” contributing to cleaner air, not just lower greenhouse gas emissions.  It is also expected to greatly reduce our dependence on foreign energy.

As CNN notes, “U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are falling” thanks to things like fracking. “Europe, by contrast, has seen its energy-sector carbon emissions remain basically flat,” even though Europe operates under a costly “cap-and-trade scheme where emissions are capped at a certain level,” and “Europe has significantly higher taxes on energy.”  Countries like Germany have blocked fracking to produce clean energy, even as they cling to a failed cap-and-trade scheme that imposes huge costs while failing to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Unfortunately, the Obama Administration has tightened restrictions on fracking, which is permitted under state law in many states.  But it has not been nearly as hostile to fracking as many liberal state governors and legislators, like North Carolina’s Bev Perdue.  By contrast, conservative governors and legislators have supported fracking, which has the potential to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution.

Environmental Luddites oppose fracking, preferring draconian and utopian energy rationing schemes instead.  They hype non-existent or exaggerated risks associated with it, ignoring the complete lack of any evidence to date that it would harm the environment.

Environmental groups like the NRDC prefer rigid government restrictions on carbon emissions by factories, farms, and vehicles, even though such restrictions could cripple the economy.  If they can’t obtain that (through EPA regulations), then they’ll take a cap-and-trade limit on emissions.

But cap-and-trade, too, is costly, and it’s virtually all pain, no gain.  Obama earlier admitted that “under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”  Although cap-and-trade supporters claim it will cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may perversely increase them and also result in dirtier air by driving industries overseas to places with few limits on air pollution of any kind (not just no limits on greenhouse gases).

As Martin Feldstein, a Harvard economist who served on Obama’s economic advisory board, noted, the cap-and-trade energy-rationing scheme backed by the “Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats” would “have a trivially small effect on global warming while imposing substantial costs on all American households. And to get political support in key states, the legislation would abandon the auctioning of permits in favor of giving permits to selected corporations.”  As he observed,  “the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the resulting increases in consumer prices” from capping the amount of carbon dioxide energy users can emit “would raise the cost of living of a typical household by $1,600 a year,” a figure that “would rise significantly” from year to year.

Meanwhile, politically-connected corporations would profit, since the “bill would give away some 85 percent of the permits” to emit carbon dioxide to favored “businesses instead of selling them at auction.”  Companies with plants overseas lobbied for Obama’s global-warming legislation, which would give them an advantage over American competitors. (This is just one illustration of how Obama’s policies effectively outsource American jobs and drive U.S. jobs overseas).  Obama’s cap-and-trade global-warming bill, which failed to pass Congress, was chock full of  corporate welfare and contained environmentally harmful ethanol subsidies.

Two EPA lawyers criticized the cap-and-trade energy bill backed by Obama as a scam, arguing in The Washington Post that it would be exploited to enrich politically-connected corporations and reward certain kinds of pollution, while having little effect on greenhouse gas emissions.  A similar scheme enacted in Europe in the name of fighting global warming enriched certain polluters, while not reducing emissions, which actually rose rose in most of Europe after it was adopted.

Obama is the “Outsourcer-in-Chief,” I explain at this link.  He has moved thousands of American jobs to foreign countries, through subsidies and regulations.  A classic example of how Obama used taxpayer money to outsource American jobs is through the green-jobs subsidies in the $800 billion stimulus package, which went overwhelmingly to foreign firms, as American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop and others have noted.

In recent years, the EPA has sought to block land from being used by claiming that vast tracts of seemingly dry land are actually “wetlands.”  The Clean Water Act gives it the power to regulate “waters of the United States.”  The EPA has interpreted that expansively to effectively mean “moistures of the United States,” treating perfectly ordinarily land as a “wetland” simply because water happens to occasionally flow downhill from it into a ditch or creek.  The four liberal Supreme Court justices largely bought this argument in the 2006 Rapanos case, so the Supreme Court is just one vote away from accepting this interpretation, which would render much of America a restricted “wetland” and financially ruin countless families.  Thus, property rights in America are hanging by a thread.

But yesterday, the flickering flame of property rights temporarily grew brighter. Rejecting the Obama Administration’s arguments, the Supreme Court held that EPA “compliance orders” restricting land use can be challenged in court if they are arbitrary and capricious — for example, if they are based on an erroneous bureaucratic interpretation of what a “wetland” is, that results in dry land improperly being declared an unusable wetland. In his concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito explained why such judicial review is essential: the EPA uses vague, inconsistent standards when it declares seemingly-dry land to be a wetland. As Justice Alito pointed out, “far from providing clarity and predictabil­ity, the agency’s latest informal guidance advises property owners that many jurisdictional determinations concern­ing wetlands can only be made on a case-by-case basis by EPA field staff. See Brief for Competitive Enterprise Institute as Amicus Curiae 7–13.”  (Justice Alito was relying on an amicus brief submitted on behalf of a Washington think-tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), by environmental lawyer Theodore Garrett of Covington & Burling).

The E.P.A. has a practice of issuing “compliance orders” to property owners telling them to stop using their land and restore it to its prior condition, under penalty of $75,000 a day in fines, and declaring in such orders that such land is a federally protected wetland. It then waits months or years before actually suing the property owner to collect the fines, which accrue daily, potentially adding up to millions in fines. But in the meantime, it insists that the property owners can’t challenge its claim that their property is a non-usable wetland in court. If they want to take issue with its claim that their property is a “wetland,” they have to wait until the EPA sues them later on to collect the fines, after they’ve racked up potentially millions in fines under the compliance order.  The order doubles the fines that a judge can impose on the property owners when the EPA ultimately sues them, although if the judge later finds the land was not in fact a “wetland,” he can refuse to impose the fines. (In the absence of a “compliance order,” the maximum fine for developing a wetland is $37,500 a day; the compliance order adds another $37,500 per day, bringing the total to $75,000 per day.  Federal law has a broad and counterintuitive notion of what is a “wetland”: for example, in one court ruling, the government was allowed to declare a property to be a “wetland” even though it appeared dry, since water occasionally passed from it into a roadside ditch that in turn flowed into another ditch that flowed into a creek).

There is no clear legal definition of what a wetland is, since the last time the Supreme Court tried to come up with a definition in the Rapanos case, the judges split 4-1-4 on how to define it, splitting three ways in three different opinions each of which had a different test for what a wetland is. The EPA has seemingly flouted even the few principles shared among a majority of the Supreme Court justices (the four-justice plurality and Justice Kennedy’s concurrence), in its vague and manipulable guidance as to what is a wetland.  In light of the huge fines that can be imposed on property owners, and the breadth and ambiguity of the EPA’s concept of “wetland,” which includes much land that seems like dry land to an ordinary person, denying property owners the right to immediately challenge an EPA “compliance order” effectively forces them to do whatever the EPA says, even if the EPA’s position was arbitrary and capricious. But that’s what federal appeals courts, at the urging of the EPA and the Obama administration, did: they denied property owners any right to challenge the EPA upon receiving a compliance order.

Even after yesterday’s decision allowing court challenges to EPA “wetlands” designations, “the combination of the uncertain reach of the Clean Water Act and the draconian penalties imposed for the sort of violations alleged in this case still leaves most property owners with little practical alternative but to dance to the EPA’s tune,” noted Justice Alito.  “Allowing aggrieved property owners to sue” the EPA “is better than nothing, but only” legislative “clarification of the reach of the Clean Water Act can rectify the underlying problem.”

The case, Sackett v. E.P.A., involved the Sacketts, a family who had purchased land for a home in a residential subdivision in Idaho:

In 2005, Chantell and Michael Sackett purchased less than two-thirds of an acre of land near Priest Lake in northern Idaho for the modest sum of $23,000. They were nearby small-business owners and wanted to become homeowners. They planned to build a three-bedroom home. The property was located in a platted residential subdivision with water and sewer hookups and was bordered on either side by existing homes. There were community roads in both the front and back of the property.

The couple was savvy enough to have conducted regulatory due diligence before they purchased the land. The previous owner informed them he had consulted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers regarding any building restrictions. There were none. After buying the property, the Sacketts applied for and received all of the pertinent local permits to build a residential dwelling as local zoning ordinances permit. In the spring of 2007, they began preparing the lot for construction. After buying the property, the Sacketts applied for and received all of the pertinent local permits to build a residential dwelling . . .

While gravel was being laid in preparation for pouring the concrete foundation, the work was interrupted by three EPA agents who told the Sacketts the property was a federally protected “wetlands.” They were served with a compliance order to immediately restore the property to its prior condition. It would cost $27,000 to remove the just-laid gravel, which was more than the property’s purchase price. Yet, the EPA compliance order made further demands. The Sacketts were ordered to plant new vegetation. The EPA specified what to plant (“native scrub-shrub, broad-leaved deciduous wetlands plants and seeded with native herbaceous plants”) and how to plant (“approximately 10 feet apart”). Additionally, they were ordered to fence the property, monitor plant growth for three growing seasons and to permit unfettered access to the property by EPA agents. Most significantly, the compliance order enjoined the Sacketts from the only permissible and practical use of the residential lot.

The EPA’s order not only shattered their homeowner dreams but, it also saddled the couple with exorbitant financial costs. They were hit with astronomical daily fines of $37,500 if they failed to comply with the order. The EPA has levied more than $40 million in fines against the Sacketts.

The Sacketts knew this had to be a colossal mistake. . . It made sense that the EPA should set aside its compliance order. They requested the EPA do so. However, the agency refused and informed the Sacketts they were not permitted to question the EPA decision. It would have cost the Sacketts more money to comply with the EPA order than the original purchase price of the property. So, the Sacketts offered to surrender the property to the EPA, but the agency refused . . .  The Sacketts filed a federal lawsuit challenging the EPA’s compliance order, claiming the EPA had no jurisdiction over their property and the compliance order violated their due process rights. . .The EPA argued the Sacketts did not have the right to judicial review of the agency’s orders as this would “disserve” the interest of the government. . .The [lower] courts . . . ruled against the Idaho couple.

As Justice Alito noted in his concurring opinion, the EPA’s argument would gut constitutional due process protections:  under the Obama Administration’s position, “if the owners want their day in court to show that their lot does not include covered wetlands, well, as a practical matter, that is just too bad. Until the EPA sues them, they are blocked from access to the courts, and the EPA may wait as long as it wants before deciding to sue. By that time, the potential fines may easily have reached the millions. In a nation that values due process, not to mention private property, such treatment is unthinkable.”

Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars lost in the Solyndra scandal, Energy Secretary Steven Chu gave himself “an A-” when he “testified before Congress after a series of bankruptcies from companies floated by green-tech stimulus loans” and was asked what “grade he would give himself as a steward of public funds.”  But it turns out that Chu’s Energy Department was much more reckless in its lending decisions than the private lenders that the Obama Administration has blamed for the financial crisis (even as the Administration has expanded the role of the government-sponsored mortgage giants and federal affordable-housing mandates that helped spawn the housing crisis), manifested in “an 85 percent failure rate on its process check.”  As Ed Morrissey notes, a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO)

looked at the handling of $30 billion outstanding in loan guarantees and future commitments and discovered that the DOE rarely follows its own written procedures for vetting and auditing applications.  In fact, in many cases, the Loan Guarantee Program (LGP) couldn’t even find the data managers needed to administer the loans properly . .

In the case of Solyndra, the Obama administration ended up overriding the expressed concerns of DOE auditors to grant the solar-tech firm $535 million in taxpayer guarantees, all of which disappeared in the company’s collapse.  In almost every case study investigated by the GAO, important steps got skipped in the reviews that determined whether loan applications would be granted.  In other cases, the documentation was so poor that the GAO couldn’t figure out what the LGP did . . . the process had at least an 85 percent failure rate on its process check.  . .

With $30 billion in taxpayer money at risk, the DOE under Steven Chu didn’t bother to conduct the reviews it claimed it would on applications for loan guarantees, didn’t keep records of what reviews they did accomplish, and signed off on loans with incomplete documentation and inadequate oversight of the risk.  The result — perhaps $6.5 billion immediately at risk, according to CBS, and possibly most of the $30 billion. . . Political connections existed with Solyndra specifically, but the DOE may have felt political pressure to sign off on loans quickly in order to get Obama’s stimulus started. . . the DOE under Chu has been anything but a careful steward of taxpayer money.

As Morrissey notes, Obama has also fostered financial irresponsibility by expanding federal bailouts “to include the real-estate speculators that helped inflate the housing bubble.”  (The speculator bailouts are being done partly with taxpayer money, and partly at the expense of innocent mortgage investors who have never been accused of any wrongdoing). The Administration has also forced some banks to make risky loans to borrowers of certain races, potentially contributing to future bank failures and bailouts.

As The Washington Post noted earlier, energy programs have been “infused with politics at every level” during the Obama administration. It hastily approved subsidies for Solyndra, whose executives are now pleading the 5th Amendment, despite obvious danger signs and warnings about the company’s likely collapse. (Later, federal officials successfully pressured Solyndra to delay its announcement about upcoming layoffs until just after the 2010 election, to avoid embarrassing the Obama administration.)  CBS News reported that there were 11 more Solyndras in the Obama Administration’s green-energy programs.

The Obama Administration has used green-jobs money from the stimulus package to outsource American jobs to countries like China: “Despite all the talk of green jobs, the overwhelming majority of stimulus money spent on wind power has gone to foreign companies, according to a new report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University’s School of Communication in Washington, D.C.” As the Investigative Reporting Workshop noted, “79 percent” of all green-jobs funding “went to companies based overseas . . . In fact, the largest grant made under the program so far, a $178 million payment on Dec. 29, went to Babcock & Brown, a bankrupt Australian company.” This just one of many ways in which the Obama administration has used taxpayer money to outsource American jobs to foreign countries.

Ironically, in his State of the Union Address tonight, President Obama railed against “outsourcing.”  That was funny, because he has spent billions of tax dollars on subsidizing the outsourcing of American jobs to foreign countries.

In his upcoming State of the Union Address, President Obama will push for more green-jobs subsidies at taxpayer expense in the name of job creation: “With a Solyndra-scandal-be-damned attitude, President Obama is expected to revive his push for new green fuel sources in Tuesday’s State of the Union address, claiming that they will boost jobs.”  But these impractical proposals are haunted by the utter failure of Obama’s existing green-energy programs to produce economically-viable jobs or fuel.

There are only 140,000 jobs in the whole renewable-energy sector, which illustrates the absurdity of Obama’s unrealistic 2008 promise “to create 5 million new green jobs.” Most of America’s existing green jobs predate the Obama Administration, which did not create them: “from 2003-2010, the rate of growth for clean jobs was 3.4 percent.”  By contrast, Obama wiped out 20,000 jobs recently just by blocking the Keystone XL Pipeline, and recent EPA rules will wipe out at least 800,000 more.

More job losses are yet to come: in 2008, President Obama admitted that under his greenhouse gas regulations, people’s utility bills would “skyrocket,” and coal-fired power plants would go “bankrupt.”  That will wipe out vast numbers of jobs in the energy sector.

Far from creating jobs, Obama’s green-energy policies have actually reduced employment in the United States by diverting American dollars to foreign firms.  The Obama Administration used federal green-jobs money to outsource American jobs to countries like China: “Despite all the talk of green jobs, the overwhelming majority of stimulus money spent on wind power has gone to foreign companies, according to a new report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop” at American University.   “79 percent” of all green-jobs funding “went to companies based overseas,” with the largest payment going to a bankrupt Australian company.  “Most of the jobs are going overseas,” said Russ Choma at the Investigative Reporting Workshop.

Meanwhile, America actually lost jobs in wind-manufacturing: “Even with the infusion of so much stimulus money, a recent report by American Wind Energy Association showed a drop in U.S. wind manufacturing jobs last year.”  (CBS News recently reported that there are 11 more companies, in addition to Solyndra, that are embroiled in financial trouble after receiving billions of dollars in taxpayer money; five have already filed for bankruptcy).  Moreover, the EPA’s own internal documents show that the administration’s global warming regulations will result in a massive “loss of steel, paper, aluminum, chemical, and cement manufacturing jobs.”

Obama’s mythical green-jobs are like other imaginary jobs he claimed to have created with the $800 billion stimulus package.  The Obama Administration took credit for jobs created in 440 non-existent Congressional districts, such as Arizona’s 15th and 86th districts (Arizona only had 8 Congressional districts, as ABC News noted with amusement).  The Washington Examiner noted that at least “75,000 jobs” Obama has claimed credit for are “clearly imaginary” or “highly doubtful.” Readers can view its interactive map of “Inflated Jobs by State.”

The Obama Administration claimed that the stimulus package would keep unemployment from ever rising above 8 percent, but it peaked at over 10 percent.  Obama claimed the stimulus was needed to prevent an “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admits that the stimulus package will shrink the economy “in the long run.”

Obama’s green-jobs pledge isn’t his only broken promise.  Obama campaigned in 2008 on a promise of a “net spending cut,” but soon after taking office, he proposed budgets that would add $4.8 trillion to the national debt.