Corporate Welfare Queens: Windbag Edition

Who could have guessed??

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.

You're aware of this part of the history:

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.

But you may not have heard this:

After the Spanish study embarrassed the White House, prompting substantial media attention and even questioning at a press conference, Obama swapped out Denmark for Spain for later references to an enacted “green jobs” program.

Soon, Denmark produced a study (“Wind Energy: The Case of Denmark“) through the think-tank CEPOS. This paper also revealed tremendous costs, and that Obama’s claim about Denmark’s “renewables” experience was also steeped in mythology.

Enter the Corporate Welfare Queens (American Wind Energy Ass'n.), and then the Obama Administration produced a document which attempted to refute both the Spanish and Danish studies. And enter (from the right), Jim Sensenbrenner.

The piece's author filed an FOIA request which included the following:

We therefore seek documents revealing the origins of the effort and clarifying the alternating, mutually exclusive claims of NREL saying DoE told me to do it and DoE telling Congress that it was all NREL’s idea, fully aware of of DoE’s extant protestations to congressional offices that the above-cited paper is of like kind with other NREL products (noting here that no paper DoE cites is comparable on any level [citations omitted]).

Congressman James Sensenbrenner wrote to Ms. Zoi two days later, asking five specific questions about how and by whose instruction this NREL paper was produced. On January 6, 2010, Zoi wrote back with a one-paragraph reply which either failed or refused to provide answers to any of the queries.

We now know that the prospect of such answers seeing the light of day was clearly of great concern to the DoE. This raises the question of whether, by refusing to share information sought by the ranking Republican on the House Select Committee on Global Warming, Ms. Zoi lied to or misled a member of Congress exercising his legitimate oversight function.

Misleading, hidden, inaccurate, evasive.

No surprise to find James Doyle and Tommy Barrett wind up with a Spanish corporate welfare queen, is it?