Yesterday, President Obama was in Iowa, touting the virtues of clean energy and the urgent need to deal with climate change. Much of the same: Out with the old, in with the new; spend lots of money; America should set an example; global warming is a real and growing threat; etc. etc.

Here is his message, in a nutshell:

“Now, the choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy. The choice we face is between prosperity and decline. We can remain the world’s leading importer of oil, or we can become the world’s leading exporter of clean energy. We can allow climate change to wreak unnatural havoc across the landscape, or we can create jobs working to prevent its worst effects. We can hand over the jobs of the 21st century to our competitors, or we can confront what countries in Europe and Asia have already recognized as both a challenge and an opportunity: The nation that leads the world in creating new energy sources will be the nation that leads the 21st-century global economy.”

President Obama is certainly correct in noting that we have a choice between prosperity and decline, but the irony is that his plans, as presented, will lead to less energy, not more. And less energy means more expensive energy.

Obama has made clear that his regime will send coal packing, yet he has offered no plausible replacement for the fuel that generates roughly half of our nation’s electricity. He wants to wean us off of foreign oil, yet petroleum meets around 96 percent of our transportation-fuel needs, and there is no commercially viable subsitute in the near future. He wants wind power to sweep the nation, but the list of reasons that won’t happen — at least no time soon — is a long one. It’s one thing to price conventional energies out of the market. It’s quite another to do so without realistic alternatives to step in and fill the void. Yet this is exactly where Obama is taking us.

He talked about creating “millions of new jobs right here in America.” Sounds great. Now, what about the jobs that will be lost, as a result of shifting resources away from more efficient to less efficient energies? As I detailed in Myth 3 of Energy & the Environment: Myths & Facts: What about the 1.8 million Americans working in the oil and gas industries? What about the over 81,000 coal-industry workers? Create green jobs all you want. Just be honest with the American public about the fact that creating jobs does not necessarily mean an overall net gain in employment. A net decline is much more likely.

(Interestingly, Obama actually mentioned nuclear power, as well as the need to expand domestic extraction of oil and natural gas: “As I’ve often said, in the short term, as we transition to renewable energy, we can and should increase our domestic production of oil and natural gas. We’re not going to transform our economy overnight. We still need more oil, we still need more gas. If we’ve got some here in the United States that we can use, we should find it and do so in an environmentally sustainable way. We also need to find safer ways to use nuclear power and store nuclear waste.”)

Plenty more to respond to from Obama’s speech, like exploring the facts about Denmark’s wind power generating 20 percent of the country’s electricity. Or his praise for California’s energy policies. I don’t even know where to begin with that one.