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.

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.

CBS News is reporting that there are 11 more Solyndras in the Obama Administration’s green-energy program:

CBS News counted 12 clean energy companies that are having trouble after collectively being approved for more than $6.5 billion in federal assistance. Five have filed for bankruptcy: The junk bond-rated Beacon, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, AES’ subsidiary Eastern Energy and Solyndra. . .Standard and Poor’s had given the [Beacon] project a rating of ‘CCC-plus.’

(A CCC rating is also shared by Greece, a virtually bankrupt nation embroiled in a massive debt crisis).

A liberal Congress must share the blame for this fiasco, since the massive $800 billion stimulus package it passed in 2009 funded these boondoggles. As a Solyndra stakeholder exulted, “there’s never been more money shoved out the government’s door in world history.”  But as the Washington Post noted, energy programs were “infused with politics at every level” under Obama.  His Administration 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).

The Obama Administration also 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.” (The stimulus package also funnelled money to left-wing community organizers and liberal lobbying groups.)

The Washington Examiner argued that the global-warming bill backed by Obama would similarly backfire, leading to deforestation, and thus increasing greenhouse gas emissions in the long run.  Obama’s so-called “cap-and-trade” legislation was full of pay-offs for special interests.  Obama once admitted that under his cap-and-trade scheme, electricity bills would “skyrocket” and coal-fed power plants would go “bankrupt.”  Treasury Department analysts estimated it could increase costs for the average household by $1761 per year.  It contained environmentally-harmful provisions, such as ethanol mandates that damage “water supplies, soil health and air quality.” Ethanol mandates have  helped destroy forests in the Third World, and spawned famines that have killed countless people in the world’s poorest countries.

The Obama Administration claimed that if the stimulus package were passed, unemployment would never go above 8 percent, but it peaked at over 10 percent.  Obama relied on exaggerated claims to push through the stimulus package, claiming it was needed to prevent the economy from suffering an “irreversible decline,” even though the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package will shrink the economy “in the long run.” Ill-conceived provisions in the stimulus package ended up destroying thousands of jobs by wiping out exports.

The billions in taxpayer money wasted on foreign green jobs are yet another breach of  Obama’s 2008 pledge of a “net spending cut,” which he broke by proposing budgets that would add $4.8 trillion to the national debt.

An Occupy Orange County protester decries mankind’s existence: “Our very existence is bad for the planet.”  “Another protester told” an interviewer “that human beings are parasites,” adding that “if you take humanity off this planet, the planet would explode with prosperity.”

In May, a group of Nobel laureates and others gathered to put humanity on trial, to decide whether humanity had breached its relations with the planet.  Representing “the planet” was none other than Obama science and technology advisor Mario Molina.

Delegates to a U.N. climate change conference signed a petition to ban water, which the petition referred to using an obvious chemical name for water that anyone who has studied science or taken a chemistry course would logically recognize (as “dihydrogen monoxide”).  The petition cited the fact that water can erode rock or metal over time.

The Washington Post gave a thumbs-down to the billions of dollars dumped into electric vehicles by the Obama Administration, noting that these electric vehicles are not a “solution to America’s dependence on foreign oil, or to global warming, in the near future. They simply pose too many issues of price and practicality to attract a large segment of the car-buying public.”  It pointed out that subsidies for electric vehicles are “trickle-down economics” that benefit a wealthy few at the expense of taxpayers.  (Each Chevy Volt costs taxpayers up to $250,000).

The Post also criticized the costly ethanol subsidies backed by the Obama Administration, noting that a recently-expired ethanol tax credit “badly distorted the global grain market, artificially raised the cost of agricultural land and did almost nothing to curb greenhouse gas emissions. A federal law requiring the use of 36 billion gallons of ethanol for fuel by 2022 still props up the industry, but the tax credit’s expiration is a victory for common sense just the same.”  The Obama Administration supports ethanol subsidies, even though they have a history of  spawning famines and food riots overseas. It has forced up the ethanol content of gasoline through EPA regulations, even though ethanol production results in deforestation, soil erosion, and water pollution.  Back in 2008, leading environmentalists lamented the devastating impact of ethanol subsidies on the global environment and the world’s poor in the Washington Post. They noted that thanks to ethanol mandates, “deadly food riots” had already “broken out in dozens of nations,” such as “Haiti and Egypt.”

Green-jobs subsidies from the $800 billion stimulus package were used to outsource American jobs to China.  The stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office now says will actually shrink the economy in the long run, contained other provisions that wiped out jobs in our export sector and aggravated America’s trade deficit.

Even the liberal Washington Post, which hasn’t endorsed a Republican for President since 1952, seems to be souring on the Obama Administration’s failed energy programs, saying they were “infused with politics at every level.” As it noted in discussing the Solyndra scandal: “Obama’s green-technology program was infused with politics at every level, The Washington Post found in an analysis of thousands of memos, company records and internal ­e-mails. Political considerations were raised repeatedly by company investors, Energy Department bureaucrats and White House officials. The records, some previously unreported, show that when warned that financial disaster might lie ahead, the administration remained steadfast in its support for Solyndra,” which was owned by major Obama backers, like George Kaiser.

As law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds notes, “all the ‘stimulus’ and ‘green energy’ stuff was never anything but a program to put taxpayer money into the hands of cronies and supporters.”

The Obama Administration hastily approved the  taxpayer subsidies for Solyndra despite obvious danger signs and warnings from accountants about the company’s likely collapse, the misgivings of agency officials, and the company’s mismanagement and lousy-quality products. (Solyndra executives are now pleading the 5th Amendment to avoid disclosing incriminating information.) The Obama administration was determined to shovel taxpayer money to its cronies as fast as it could. As an Obama fundraiser and Solyndra stakeholder exulted,  “there’s never been more money shoved out of the government’s door in world history and probably never will be again than in the last few months and the next 18 months. And our selfish parochial goal is to get as much of it . . . as we possibly can.”  “At the time Solyndra received its grant, Vice President Joe Biden declared that the Solyndra investment is ‘exactly what the [the stimulus package] is all about.’”

While diverting taxpayer money away from productive and efficient businesses to corporate-welfare recipients controlled by political cronies, the Obama Administration is busy wiping out jobs through thousands of pages of counterproductive regulations.  Some of these new regulations are designed to spawn lawsuits that will enrich trial lawyers at businesses’  and consumers’ expense.

Obama appointees at the EEOC are busy harassing businesses that hire and fire based on merit, thus discouraging employers from hiring or expanding operations, and the EEOC is bringing costly, unjustified lawsuits against businesses.  The 2010 healthcare law imposes financial burdens — some of them large, and others difficult to calculate — on the nation’s employers, resulting in some business owners deciding not to expand or hire new employees.

Many businesses are also suffering from the effects of the Dodd-Frank financial “reform” law, a 2,315 page monstrosity that makes it harder for small businesses to obtain credit, and also outsources and wipes out jobs in the financial sector. Even one-time Obama supporters in the business community have grown disenchanted: Democratic businessman Steve Wynn called Obama“the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime,” saying that “the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs.”

The Obama administration has sought to temporarily pump up the economy with stimulus spending paid for with massive deficits, but as the Congressional Budget Office has noted, the stimulus package will actually shrink the economy in the long run, so it will not be able to offset the economic drag resulting from all of the Obama administration’s new regulations and red tape.

Now that Republicans feel that they have won a minor victory over Obama on the debt deal, they might be more likely to make concessions on non-debt/spending related issues like the confirmation of Commerce Secretary nominee John Bryson.  It is more important than ever that fans of the free-market pressure the Senate to oppose the nomination of this rent-seeking, radical environmentalist.  In a Kansas City Star op-ed published this morning, I show why his corporatist past is reason enough to block Bryson’s nomination.

President Obama’s nominee for secretary of commerce, John Bryson, is a terrible choice for a Cabinet department ostensibly dedicated to promoting economic growth and job creation. In fact, Bryson has made a career out of undermining both. Over the years, he has used his government connections to game the political process and receive billions in bailouts and subsidies. America does not need any more crony capitalists in high places.

Bryson’s career began as a regulator in California in 1976, when then-Gov. Jerry Brown appointed him to the State Water Resources Control Board. In 1979, Brown appointed him to chair California’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC). As chairman, he deliberately drove up electricity rates by using fixed-rate contracts that passed the costs of massive wind energy projects on to consumers.

Bryson readily acknowledges the effects of his policies during this period. “What California has done is knowingly incur higher cents per-kilowatt-hour costs,” he boasted in 2009. “They’re substantially higher than the U.S. average in order to invest in the kind of systems we have in California. … That’s been part of the regulatory environment for the investor-owned utilities as long as I’ve been close to it.”

As PUC chairman, Bryson helped create a regulatory structure that fixed utilities’ profits at a percent of costs. As a result, the utilities make money not by bringing costs down and selling more electricity, but by raising costs with unnecessary, expensive and redundant projects.

Moving from government to industry, Bryson parlayed his intimate knowledge of the regulatory landscape – which he helped create – into a high-level position with the utility Southern California Edison in the mid-1980s. After rising to CEO of parent company Edison International, he then used his government connections to make a series of cushy political deals for the utility. …

Bryson’s career demonstrates that he trusts politicians and bureaucrats, not businesses competing in the market, to drive the economy. Just as voters in 2010 rejected bailouts and subsidies for politically favored businesses, the Senate should reject the confirmation of John Bryson.

Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2011/08/03/3054097/the-case-against-john-bryson.html#ixzz1U01VqwoO