Detroit — “Green is the new gold,” says Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke agrees, declaring that “the energy sector represents the opportunity of the next century, especially in the Midwest.” These economic “experts,” along with dozens of their media, green, and government allies, gathered together in downtown Detroit for the Midwestern Governors Association’s (MGA) Jobs and Energy Forum last week to proclaim the future manufacturing shape of the industrial Midwest.

Drafting something called the “Energy Security and Climate Stewardship Roadmap,” the MGA’s extraordinary prescience as to the future direction of the Midwest’s economy makes sense only with total government control.

Otherwise, the roadmap as outlined by Granholm & Co. betrays a fundamental misunderstanding as to how this region became a global manufacturing powerhouse in the first place. Take Michigan.

Led by Detroit, the state became an industrial mecca by exploiting the region’s wood, water, and steel (from the Ohio Valley) resources to build automobiles. Their manufacture depended on importing cheap coal from West Virginia and Pennsylvania to run centralized, efficient coal plants that fed huge, energy-hungry assembly lines churning out product for a cost-sensitive consumer market.

By contrast, Granholm (who, incredibly, chairs the MGA despite presiding over the region’s worst economy) prescribes a government-run rather than a consumer-run market which would require 20 percent of power to come from expensive and dispersed wind-power sources, and that — she told Fox News Sunday this weekend — would produce “products that are associated with reducing global warming and increasing energy efficiency.” That is hardly a prescription for diversifying an economy beyond a mass-market product like autos.

“We know that the globe is going to need those solutions,” she continued. Really? And does she know that 100 years ago most cars sold were electric — until a man named Henry Ford revolutionized the automobile with gas-powered cars that could be produced more reliably and for considerably less money? And that he brought unprecedented wealth to his state without a single government RPS?