Told you so.
Mid-collapse, Spain has finally settled on what it hopes will be the way out of the bankrupting “green economy” subsidies and mandates that President Obama cited as his model, the reality of which has been detailed here at Planet Gore and, of course, more thoroughly in Power Grab. This takes the form of reducing the feed-in tariffs for solar PV by 5 percent (for small rooftop arrays), 25 percent (large rooftop arrays), and 45 percent (ground-based arrays).
While Spain’s Socialist government worked on how exactly to pull the plug on the disaster, the banks stepped in to note that they were on the hook for having underwritten it, and therefore could go under right alongside the phony-baloney bubble industry of “renewables.” So this subsidy cut, including retroactive provisions for those already blessed by the wealth transfer, is a compromise.
The guy who should be taking the real victory lap right now is Prof. Gabriel Calzada, who first exposed the truth about Spain’s renewabubble after President Obama told the American on at least eight occasions to look at Spain’s experience if we wanted to know what was in store for us. In return, Calzada received shabby treatment by the Obama administration, Rep. Ed Markey, the communist-affiliated trade union in Spain, its renewables industry, Spanish ministers who phoned Calzada’s university seeking his dismissal, and, of course, various mouthpieces for the ‘green agenda’ in the U.S. He was right. They were wrong.
But add this affirmation to the Wall Street Journal’s detailing the EPA’s unprecedented assault on the economy, having “turned a regulatory firehose on U.S. business and the power industry in particular,” noted here by Greg. This was only one among a handful of stories popping up this week and last affirming our arguments and evidence.
The most delightful of these articles was this lapse into candor by a German IPCC official, coming mere days after Scientific American ran a piece by two social scientists expressing bewilderment that I would dare to say that the green agenda isn’t about the climate but a way to use the state to create scarcity in order to impose a particular set of values on you. Which is nothing more than what cap-and-trade and ‘green economy’ advocates from Van Jones to President Obama have acknowledged on so many occasions. And where to begin with Tom “Totalitarianism is Cool” Friedman?
Regardless, the sociologists’ conclusion was that I and the Chamber of Commerce warrant further ‘research’ as they try to figure out this strange sub-culture standing in their way. Possibly their research could begin with reading Power Grab, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, and Red Hot Lies. This agenda and its proponents aren’t all that difficult to figure out. You just have to listen to them.