It’s interesting to note that in a “debate” in my state amongst the five candidates for my district’s House of Representatives congressman, the “green” Republican incumbent has abandoned the whole “climate change” trope and shifted to “green jobs” and “energy independence” for the sake of our “national security” as “reasons” for new regulations and further government interference.

This article from NRO exposes the whole “jobs” fantasy—there is more where the below came from:

Surely, however, a decade of subsi dizing renewable energy means that Ger many now produces substantial amounts of it, and has freed itself from dependence on foreign powers? No. Wind power represents about 6 percent of German electricity generation, and solar power is a mere tenth of that. Most German electricity is generated from natural gas, and Germany obtains 40 percent of its gas from Russia, a figure projected to rise to as much as 60 percent by 2020.

What about strengthening the middle class? Well, consumers have borne the cost of the policy. They paid over $100 billion to subsidize wind and solar power over the last decade, with the costs of the subsidies accounting for 7.5 percent of household electricity prices.

As for the climate effect, subsidizing green energy is an extremely expensive way of reducing emissions. The price for a permit to emit one ton of CO2 under Europe’s cap-and-trade scheme — the mar ket cost of reducing emissions — is about $20. Reducing emissions by subsidizing wind power works out to a cost of $80 a ton. For solar power, the cost is a staggering $1,050 a ton.

Finally, the policy has not even supported innovation. The study found that “claims about technological innovation benefits of Germany’s first-actor status are unsupportable: In fact, the regime appears to be counterproductive in that respect, stifling innovation by encouraging producers to lock into existing technologies.” Given that even Secretary Chu admits that we need “Nobel-level breakthroughs” in energy technology to have any hope of reducing emissions by 2050, locking in these existing technologies through green-jobs programs would in deed be counterproductive.

The story is the same in Spain, which set out to be the world leader in solar technology. A study by a team from King Juan Carlos University in Madrid led by Gabriel Calzada Alvarez found that the opportunity costs of public investment in renewable energy were very high, resulting not just in significant numbers of jobs destroyed or never created, but in unsustainable bubbles in the renewables sector…