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On Monday, May 20, in room 406 of the Senate Dirksen Office Building, the Competitive Enterprise Institute held a Congressional staff and media briefing on “EPA’s FOIA Scandals: ‘Richard Windsor,’ Gina McCarthy, and the Abuse of Power,” given by Chris Horner, author of The Liberal War on Transparency and CEI Senior Fellow. Video of Chris’s presentation is available below.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal gave a fascinating snapshot of the stupidity of the global solar market. As it is with all good news reports, the first paragraph says it all:

BEIJING—Solar-panel makers in China are open to raising prices and limiting exports to the European Union as a way to avoid steep trade tariffs, industry representatives said Thursday.

Allow me to put this in perspective. European consumers want solar panels. Indeed, they are forced to want them, due to Soviet-style green energy production quotas enacted by the EU. That’s the context: Europeans wanting/having to buy this product.

Against this backdrop, manufacturers in China are OFFERING to raise prices. They aren’t colluding to make more money; rather, they are voluntarily raising prices against their better judgment. Why? Because EU officials are threatening to raise prices by slapping tariffs on imports of Chinese solar panels (which, again, are products that Europeans want to buy).

Keep in mind as well that the EU’s threatened tariff would co-exist with national-level subsidies, known as “feed in tariffs,” designed to suppress the price of solar panels. This is true in Germany and Spain, off the top of my head, and likely true in other countries.

So there’s an EU policy that forces Europeans to buy solar panels. Yet there is also an EU policy meant to make solar panels much more expensive. Finally, there are several European policies meant to make them much cheaper. Got that?

Such are the endless and inefficient complexities wrought when government creates an industry out of whole cloth, as any member of the Gosplan could have told you.

E&E EnergyWire (subscription required) last week reported that Virginia Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe has endorsed federal legislation that would open offshore Virginia to oil and gas drilling. This is a major shift from his failed 2009 campaign, during which he opposed offshore drilling. On energy policy, McAuliffe also has done a U-turn on coal. In 2009, he pledged to never allow a coal fired power plant; now, he doesn’t mention coal-fired power, but his campaign does support increased coal exports.

McAuliffe’s abrupt shift in energy policy mirrors President Barack Obama’s performance during debates with GOP candidate Mitt Romney in late 2012. During his first term, President Obama’s administration imposed a suite of policies meant to inhibit hydrocarbon energy production in the United States. Yet during the debate, when the American public was paying attention, the President championed his supposed support for more oil and gas drilling, and even claimed to be a booster of the coal industry.

Over at National Review, Eliana Johnson has an excellent post about my colleague Chris Horner’s latest FOIA find. Evidently, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson took her Congressional-mandated transparency training using her false identity, “Richard Windsor.”And Mr. Windsor did well, because she was rewarded with three certificates attesting to her being a “scholar of ethical behavior.”

Documents released by the agency in response to a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that, for three years, the EPA certified Windsor as a “scholar of ethical behavior.”

The agency also documented the nonexistent Windsor’s completion of training courses in the management of e-mail records, cyber-security awareness, and what appears to be a counter-terror initiative that urges federal employees to report suspicious activity.

The EPA made the certifications public in response to a FOIA request from Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who was tipped off to Jackson’s use of the Windsor account by agency employees while he was researching his 2012 book, The Liberal War on Transparency. Horner says that the EPA probably issued agency-wide training requirements for anybody who wished to maintain an active e-mail address, “never contemplating a false identity or fake employee would be created.”

So…EPA’s bloated bureaucracy thought that Lisa Jackson’s alias, the existence of which is a violation of transparency ethics, was a real person, and the agency awarded him/her a citation for ethics. Ladies and gentleman, your taxes at work!

This strange juxtaposition (i.e., Lisa Jackson ostensibly demonstrating her ethical behavior in the act of committing a gross ethical violation) immediately brought to mind the end of Billy Madison, when Billy’s nemesis, Eric, had a meltdown over “business ethics.” [click to continue…]