More "Green" Science Misconduct

Last year, the President was trying to convince Congress to spend millions of dollars on wind turbines by saying the program would create jobs. He was perturbed by a then-recent report out of Spain that its wind power programs had cost 2.2 jobs elsewhere in the economy per "green" job created and at a cost of $800,000 a piece!

So what happened? His lackeys at Department of Energy coordinated with "green" lobbyists from the American Wind Energy Association and the Global Wind Energy Council and the Soros-funded think tank the Center for American Progress to produce criticism of the Spanish report. The short attack piece they produced under the seal of the Department of Energy (PDF) was then used by the President to keep pretending that green jobs aren't the economic black hole that the Spanish report (and common sense) tells us they are.

According to emails (damn those ever-incriminating emails!) recovered by FOIA request, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a division of Department of Energy, got interested in producing the report because the lobbyists asked them to. For example, from an AWEA email to NREL with the subject "Spanish jobs report":

"It is critical we respond, this thing won't die and its doing a good job of undermining our green job message."

And from NREL emails:

"AWEA policy people are quite concerned about a recent report published in Spain (likely the one cited here) and I suspect they are not the only ones." ... "We need to come up with an appropriate response to these criticisms soon. I just spoke to a few people at AWEA about this." ... "The AWEA folks are wondering what we'll do, so if this is our plan, I'll let them know."

One of the scientists actually thought there might be a problem with this:

"Are there issues with the no-lobbying prohibition? I recognize that-this is not a lobbying piece per se, but contributing directly to an AWEA and UCS communique could raise eyebrows. This may be perfectly ok, but I don't really know and we should check."

His concerns were swept aside.

As if that wasn't bad enough, Assistant Secretary of Energy Cathy Zoi, formerly (?) a lobbyist with Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, then lied to Congress about the provenance of the attack memo, claiming that it was put together only because NREL "felt compelled to post the response... due to the high media interest in green jobs creation."

She failed to mention the entanglement between NREL "scientists" and wind energy lobbyists. That liaison would have been left undiscovered if Competitive Enterprise Institute hadn't smelled the stench coming out of Obama's Department of Energy.

Thanks to eddiebear over at DoublePlusUndead.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 07:53 PM

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