Recently, several U.S. senators including our own Senator Sherrod Brown had the courage to take on this issue. According to Senator Charles Schumer's Web site on March 4: "We cannot sit idly by while China races to the forefront of clean energy production at the expense of U.S. manufacturing, U.S. jobs, and U.S. energy independence. And we certainly can't shoot ourselves in the foot by helping to finance Chinese clean energy production.

Research director Gabriel Calzada Alvarez didn't object to wind power itself, but found that when a government artificially props up this industry with subsidies, higher electrical costs (31%), tax hikes (5%) and government debt follow. Fact is, these subsidies have the same "Cuisinart" effect on jobs as wind-generating propeller blades have on birds. Every green job costs $800,000 to create and 90% of them are temporary, he found. Alvarez made no bones about the lessons of Spain for the Obama administration.

Nevertheless, many states have adopted a Jeopardy!-like approach in their energy policies. They are imposing detailed renewable energy mandates that prescribe how much of which renewable energy types must be installed by specific dates. But as in the game show, these renewable energy policies are the correct answers only in response to the right questions. California is the leading contestant in this perilous renewable energy game.

Chinese wind power provider A-Power Energy Generation Systems(SPWR) and its U.S.-based partners announced on Thursday plans to build a wind turbine production and assembly plant in Nevada that will create up to 1,000 permanent jobs for the state and more jobs during the construction phase. The announcement about the Nevada plant was notable for two reasons: the selection of Nevada as home state for the wind energy plant, and the political power broker who is associated with the state.

What is clear is that the Department of Energy then worked with Center for American Progress and the industry lobby AWEA to produce an attack that would serve all their interests. That may not be all because we have appealed energy's decision to withhold numerous documents. Incredibly, it refuses to release documents exchanged between it and the pressure group CAP and lobbyist AWEA.

Yet public officials from the president and vice president to Cabinet and congressional leaders insult our intelligence by delivering scripted messages that the future of the new energy system in this country is clean renewable energy that will be delivered by countless so-called green jobs. The fake chimes of energy independence echo up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. Do headlines make truth, regardless of content? What is it about organizations like Repower America and the Center for American Progress, which provide ideology, not substance, to the administration and congressional leadership on the so-called new energy system? Why are their conclusions unchallenged?

As a result, one has produced a fuel cell that can turn natural gas or natural grass into electricity; the other has a technology that might make coal the cleanest, cheapest energy source by turning its carbon-dioxide emissions into bricks to build your next house. Though our country may be flagging, it's because of innovators like these that you should never - ever - write us off.

Supporters of the wind farm need to honestly ask themselves whether they would like to have 130 huge turbines planted on their favorite public space, whether it be a mountain ridge in Vermont, a canyon in the Southwest, or an ocean vista off Key West. With a footprint larger than Manhattan, with turbines each the size of the Statue of Liberty, this industrial project is out of place in an area that borders marine sanctuaries on all sides. Nantucket Sound is a national treasure and it must be protected at all costs.

Money spent on wind turbines from China will not jump-start an industry in America. The whole point of the federal government's stimulus program is to create jobs. In America. Unfortunately, that's not how it's working out, according to four U.S. senators who raise concerns that should not be ignored.

An Ontario company's quest to erect 715 wind turbines in the shallows of Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie has many people asking questions -- and rightly so. SouthPoint Wind announced plans last week for a 1,400-megawatt project that would dwarf other Canadian efforts to generate electricity from the wind. It would draw power from 165 turbines off the south shore of Lake St. Clair and 550 turbines near the north shore of Lake Erie.

I cannot believe that it took four Democratic senators to hit the White House mule with a 2 by 4 on such an obvious matter of good politics and policy yesterday, but kudos to Bob Casey, Jon Tester, Sherrod Brown, and Chuck Schumer for insisting that funds from the 2009 stimulus bill be used to create American jobs, not foreign ones.

You know the saying: Ignorance is bliss. Unfortunately for the American taxpayer, when it comes to the wind turbine industry, ignorance is not as blissful as it is infuriating. According to a new report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop (in coordination with ABC's World News with Diane Sawyer and the Watchdog Institute), Obama can now add wind turbines to his growing list of failures within the stimulus package.

"Green jobs" have become a central underpinning of the Obama administration's rationale to promote clean energy. But how valid is the assumption that a "clean-energy" economy will generate enough jobs to mitigate today's high level of unemployment -- new jobless claims were up 22,000 this week -- and to meet the needs of future generations? A green economy would have to spout jobs in the millions to do both. The facts challenge the prevailing thinking among some policymakers and officials that green jobs are a principal reason for transforming the economy.

Questions should be asked about the National Renewable Energy Laboratory relationship to the American Wind Energy Association's propaganda machine. The DoE report 20% Wind Energy by 2030: Increasing Wind Energy's Contribution to U.S. Electricity Supply acknowledges the reports dependency on data supplied by the wind industry.

American University's Investigative Reporting Workshop found that foreign turbine makers have received about 80 percent of nearly $2 billion in stimulus wind-power funding. The workshop estimates about 6,000 jobs have been created overseas versus just a few hundred here.

This letter was submitted to the Cape Cod Times newspaper in response to the report claiming the Cape Wind project will save $4.6 billion in costs to New England over 25 years of operation.

Well, there aren't many green jobs. Certainly not in the wind business. The United States installed more wind power last year -- 9,900 megawatts, or enough to power 2.4 million homes -- than in any other year. The growth in wind farm installations was a product of federal stimulus spending. Nonetheless, half the windmills were built overseas, and wind equipment manufacturers cut as many as 2,000 jobs last year.

Every day at wind farms across America threatened or endangered species are killed from collisions with blades of the prop wind turbine. This is considered legal because the offending wind farms either hold the "incidental take permit" or were not required to have one because they did not fully disclose environmental impacts of their activities.

Back in the 1950s, the standard Western movie would include a scene in which some dignitary from Washington would meet with an Indian chief and his council in the hope of resolving grievances that had sent the Indians on the warpath. The other day, we got a replay of that scene when a real-life government dignitary sailed into Nantucket Sound with a group of Wampanoag Indians for the ostensible purpose of resolving their grievances.

Cape Wind's staking a claim on Nantucket Sound seems to belong to the oil wildcatters' era ("There Will Be Wind?"), not the modern age of cooperative development that calls forth a nation's resources not just from its corporations but also its government and research institutions. This is not to say Cape Wind failed to do its homework. It identified and exploited a loophole in the Sound's protection from industrialization, and its scientists made their case that they could produce energy at that site without significant environmental damage.