Over on the Corner today, Veronique de Rugy notes WaPo’s welcome acknowledgment that throwing taxpayer money at renewable energy will not mean jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs — far from it:

In this morning’s Washington Post, Suni Sharan, director of the Smart Grid Initiative at GE from 2008 to 2009, questions the validity of “the assumption that a ‘clean-energy’ economy will generate enough jobs to mitigate today’s high level of unemployment.”

And yet, as he writes, “‘green jobs’ have become a central underpinning of the Obama administration’s rationale to promote clean energy.” He explains that “the near-term expected levels of investment in and adoption of renewable sources of energy mean that net job creation should top out in the tens of thousands, as opposed to the desired hundreds of thousands or more.”

Sharan concludes that “for the purpose of creating jobs, then, a ‘clean-energy economy’ will not offer a panacea” and that “those who take great pains to tout the ‘job-creation potential’ of the green space might just end up inducing labor pains all around.”

Somehow, I get the feeling that President Obama will persist in trying to make this bogus economic case for energy inefficiency, taxation, and (eventually) rationing.

“Some say it’s too expensive, say that we can’t afford it,” he’ll observe — in one of those rare instances when his some people trope actually applies to some real people. “But I say we can’t afford not to lead the world in this industry,” he will repeat from the scrolling teleprompter.

It seems to me that we can afford to trail the rest of the world — not just fail to lead, but contentedly bring up the rear — in the killing-jobs-and-burning-big-sacks-of-cash industry.