FOIA Docs: Obama Asked Soros and Lobbyists to Hide Wind Energy Program Failures

March 8, 2010

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Source: Wizbang - Kim Priestap

The Blog Prof links to Chris Horner's article at Pajamas Media that details how Barack Obama, George Soros, and wind energy lobbyists colluded to hide the details of two economic studies that showed the wind energy programs in Spain and Denmark didn't help the economy and create jobs as the president said they did. I'm only including a small portion of Chris's article, but it's chock full of very interesting nuggets of information about how the Obama administration tried to undermine the credibility of the two studies:

After two studies refuted President Barack Obama's assertions regarding the success of Spain's and Denmark's wind energy programs, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request reveals the Department of Energy turned to George Soros and to wind industry lobbyists to attack the studies.
Via the FOIA request, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has learned that the Department of Energy -- specifically the office headed by Al Gore's company's former CEO, Cathy Zoi -- turned to George Soros' Center for American Progress and other wind industry lobbyists to help push Obama's wind energy proposals.

The FOIA request was not entirely complied with, and CEI just filed an appeal over documents still being withheld. In addition to withholding many internal communications, the administration is withholding communications with these lobbyists and other related communications, claiming they constitute "inter-agency memoranda." This implies that, according to the DoE, wind industry lobbyists and Soros's Center for American Progress are -- for legal purposes -- extensions of the government.

This is a defense commonly employed against FOIA requests when seeking to withhold certain communications with, for example, paid consultants.

As candidate and president, on eight separate occasions Barack Obama instructed Americans to "think about what's happening in countries like Spain [and] Germany" if they wanted to know what successful "green jobs" policies look like, and if they wanted to know what we should expect here in the U.S. from his agenda.

Some European economists took a look. In March, a research team from Madrid's King Juan Carlos University produced a detailed, substantive, heavily sourced, two-method paper: "Study of the Effects on Employment of Public Aid to Renewable Energy Sources." The paper concluded that Spain's "green jobs" program was an economic failure, in fact costing Spain many jobs.

So the green jobs initiatives in Europe were deemed a failure. That didn't deter Barack Obama from trying to foist his massive green jobs initiative on the rest of us. He launched his own effort to "hide the decline," the economic decline that green jobs created in Europe from the American people.

Now, I am not by any means an expert on wind energy, but The Blog Prof is. He is an Associate Professor of Engineering at Oakland University and teaches a class about wind turbines and says this:

Now let me preface this post by saying that I am actually a fan of wind power. I mean - I do teach the subject after all at the university. What I am against is government pushing the technology which has led to an artificial spike in demand and has raised corresponding prices, in essence created a wind turbine bubble that will soon pop when the demand comes back down to where it was supposed to be all along. In addition, there is little if any environmental benefit to wind turbines as many, especially in the media and political classes, ignore completely the raw material, energy and manufacturing that goes into each. It's far from 'green.' Europe is at least learning the former lesson as its push for wind turbines is not having the beneficial economic effect that it was purported to have... I have posted a couple of times on the Spanish 'green' jobs or lack thereof, including this post - The True Cost of "Green Jobs"- with the conclusion that each green job displaced 2.2 conventional jobs. Denmark found a similar disaster afoot.

Which is why Obama called on Soros and his merry band of wind energy lobbyists to do what they could to hide the reality that wind energy does not create jobs, but kills them instead. As the president's team did their best to undermine the reports, President Obama battled forward and continued with his narrative that a green economy is a more prosperous economy even though he knew the truth. To hell with the negative economic impact his green jobs initiative will have on America's already weak economy. To this day Obama continues to push his environmental agenda no matter how bad it will be economically for our nation because it, just like his health care reform agenda, is the vehicle that will bring the American people under the control of the federal government.

The Washington Examiner has more in an editorial here.