“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.…

“Let’s stop politicalizing our electricity supply. Let’s eliminate all tax credits for energy production. Let’s require that utility scale generators produce firm, dispatchable capacity, and eliminate those that don’t.

Let’s demand that electricity grids and their regulators provide abundant highly reliable and secure electricity consistent with the most informed notions of public health. Abundant electricity will offer consumers real choice, resulting in lower prices and increased value.”

The most recent effort by those seeking profit from “green energy” evidently presumes that rate and taxpayers, if not most of the country’s citizenry, were born yesterday. Which made me think of Billie Dawn’s wicked malaprop in the movie classic, Born Yesterday: “This country and its institutions belong to the people who inhibit it.”

Few initiatives better illustrate how the nation’s future is being seized by those who would inhibit it than last week’s plea to “stop politicizing green energy.” …

In business and in government, lesson after lesson has been learned against trusting the ‘smartest guys in the room.’

Remember Enron, where doubters were told by CEO Jeff Skilling that they just didn’t ‘get it’? … the alarmist climate scientists who have long stated that the science is settled…. the Obama Administration energy decision-makers who know which technologies are ‘environmentally sustainable’ and are ‘commercially promising’?

F. A. Hayek warned against the ‘pretense of knowledge” where an intellectual elite via government coercion plans for the rest of us. Economist/educator Russell Roberts (Mercatus Center, George Mason University) explained what Hayek meant in a Wall Street Journal piece, “Is the Dismal Science Really a Science?”

If economics is a science, it is more like biology than physics. Biologists try to understand the relationships in a complex system.