Regulations and mandates that force nationwide cuts in carbon dioxide emissions offer only speculative environmental benefits, if any, as a switch to wind and solar power will certainly cause more harm than good to the environment. But command-and-control forces in Congress are headed in that direction, with the House narrowly passing a bill to cap CO2 emissions, and the Senate taking up a companion bill this month.

But if US wind turbine manufacturers want another foreign renewables contingent to worry about, there's always the Europeans. A study by non-profit group the Investigative Reporting Workshop found that 84 per cent of the $1.05bn handed out by the US government since September 1 has gone to foreign companies - mostly European. It's not an overwhelmingly surprising finding given that the US subsidiary of Spain's Iberdrola Renovables - the biggest wind farm operator in the world - was also the biggest recipient of the funds. And big European turbine manufacturers such as Vestas have been quite clear that they see the US as their big growth market.

When industries look for government subsidies for money-losing propositions, a common business model these days, one of the most important strategic elements is to make sure you have a well-oiled public relations machine to keep the facts from getting in the way. Voters don't like to back money-losers, which means keeping them steadily misinformed or at least confused. Renewable energy industries - wind, solar, biomass, human treadmills - have a particularly tough job.

In AWEA's blog post, they describe a national Renewable Electricity Standard as "a free-market" program. That is not accurate. In free markets, people are free to choose. A Renewable Electricity Standard forces people to buy wind, solar, and other government-approved energy sources. It is a mandate. Forcing someone to buy your product is not a free-market program by any definition. Contrary to AWEA's assertion that a Renewable Electricity Standard would lower energy prices, common sense and real-world evidence suggest otherwise.

Wind power costs a lot to build and nothing to operate. Could it hammer the profits of power utilities that currently charge a premium to light your home by burning the decayed remains of ancient organisms? Investors shouldn't be too worried, according to Lasan Johong, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. Johong says that increasing our reliance on wind power could actually raise power prices significantly.

Investment bankers are all aflutter with the onset of stimulus money for renewable energy projects according to the August 31 Wall Street Journal. After a long lag, numerous firms have again invested upwards of $100 million in wind farms. Investors are attracted by the quick returns made possible by the hefty federal grants and tax benefits. The growing subsidies for wind power mask wind's high cost and inherent limitations, but only for so long. ...Although appealing to many, wind power is an extremely expensive, inefficient, and unreliable source of electricity, incapable of providing base load power. Wind's intermittency, variability, line loss, necessary back-up generation, transmission needs, and dispatch complexity limit the amount of electricity wind can secure.

Alternative energy has become quite fashionable, especially in electricity generation. Wind, solar, tides, dairies. If you can work "carbon emissions" or "global warming" into the press release, you've got a winner. Electricity is the lifeblood of our America. Are you ready to turn back the clock on your standard of living? Until the technology improves on alternative electric energy sources, they all have to be considered experimental and supplementary. Here's why.

Two Danish experts in the field of wind energy will be in Washington for the next three days to speak on the subject of wind generated electricity. One would expect they are here to brag on the fact that their country is a leader in the field and that they already satisfy, as President Obama puts it, "20 percent of the electricity through wind power." One would be wrong in such an expectation. They are here to warn us about the dangers of putting our electricity needs in the wind power basket.

The tax-dodging Treasury secretary and the chief of the unconstitutional department of energy announced more than half of a billion dollars in unconstitutional government handouts to energy companies this week, most of which will go toward expensive, inefficient wind power through a foreign-owned company. And this is just the "first round." Under the guise of "creating jobs" and "clean energy," this portion of the $54 billion allocated for energy in the "stimulus package" is expected to eventually siphon more than $3 billion from the productive economy - killing a great number of jobs in the process.

In my original post about the Obama administration's awarding of $503 million in "stimulus" funds for alternative energy projects, I wrote that the recipient of $294 million, Iberdrola SA, had executives who had donated more than $21,000 to the Obama campaign and related funds. Another $115 million in funds for windmills went to a company called First Wind, which, I noted, had owners that included D.E. Shaw and Madison Dearborn Partners. Shaw is the firm at which President Obama's chief of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, held a $5.2 million a year, one-day-a-week job, and Madison Dearborn is the firm of which Rahm Emanuel, now the White House chief of staff, said, "They've been not only supporters of mine, they're friends of mine."

Congress and many state legislatures, including Minnesota's, are exaggerating the potential for renewable energy, especially from wind, solar and biofuels. By assuming that wind can supply 20 percent to 25 percent of our electric power in the coming decade, or that farm fields can replace oil and gas fields, our representatives can avoid voting on hard choices.

The stimulus package passed by Congress in February included almost $80 billion for renewable energy, energy efficiency, mass transit, updating the electrical grid and research. Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar has made production, development, and delivery of renewable energy one of his department's highest priorities. But the government's focus on using public lands for power generation is not the best solution for our solar energy needs. There is a better way.

The Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House by a 219-to-212 margin in late June seeks to punitively tax America's electric utilities that rely on energy sources now contributing 90% of our current electricity (or 71%, if you want to leave out nuclear). These taxes will be used to subsidize the 9% of renewable contributors (really only 3% when you leave out hydro). In other words, Waxman-Markey is betting the future of U.S. electricity production on sources that now contribute 3% of the total.

Boone Pickens, Nacel Energy and Vestas Iberia have been issuing statements and placing print, radio and television ads, extolling the virtues of wind as an affordable, sustainable energy resource. Renewable energy reality is slowly taking hold, however.

One good thing about our current economic crisis: It might bring a sense of reality to our expectations about renewable energy. The best recent evidence is the decision by T. Boone Pickens to abandon plans for his monster wind farm in Texas, billed by the oil billionaire as a step in transforming the United States from dependence on oil and coal.

Of course, politicians are not alone. It's not unusual to find an economist who succumbs to the dark side of politics, letting political preferences override sound economic reasoning. A glaring example of politics overriding economics came June 26 when the U.S. House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act. ...In effect, politicians are willing to wreak havoc on the U.S. economy for the sake of green politics.

The focus is on renewables, the energy sources that we imagine will displace carbon-based sources in the future as, to make it so, we constrain and tax abundant oil, natural gas, and coal supplies into undeserved oblivion. Good luck to us, I suppose. But, bearing in mind the allure of the renewables, one despairs of what is non-renewable about the near shore waters we have till now enjoyed and exploited so enthusiastically.

Europe is finally cottoning on to the costs of tackling climate change, says the WSJ edit page, as economic fears lead to backsliding on the environment: "In other words, Western European leaders are the latest to discover that climate-change talk is cheap, but carbon-emissions regulation is expensive." So how to fight climate change?

While proponents of the bill have sought to argue that the costs of such a system would be negligible, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the bill proposes a massive and highly regressive tax on the U.S. economy, and could potentially cause not only extensive business failures, unemployment and privation within our borders, but starvation among poorer populations elsewhere. To understand this, it is only necessary to look at the numbers.

Renewable energy faces many hurdles before it is "ready for prime-time", not the least of which is the ability for the industry to sustain itself long-term without government subsidies. Simply put, green energy has to provide sufficient profit for companies to invest in the infrastructure needed to produce it. Without government subsidies, that is not currently possible.