Green Herring

If Obama's cap-and-trade plan works as advertised, it will create incentives for businesses to achieve greenhouse gas reductions as efficiently as possible. He nevertheless cannot resist centrally planning the response -- for example, by arbitrarily requiring that 25 percent of the nation's electricity come from renewable resources by 2025, instead of letting the market decide what mix of conservation and alternative energy makes the most sense.

A recent RAND Corporation study concludes that, without "dramatic progress in renewable energy technology," reaching this "25X'25" goal will mean "significantly increasing consumer costs." And the study did not consider "the transition and adjustment costs associated with initiating such a significant shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy technologies."

Those costs involve not just the loss of jobs in carbon-intense parts of the economy but the loss of jobs that would be created if the resources used to mitigate global warming were available for other purposes. Obama and other "clean energy" boosters do not take those losses into account, acting as if every "green job" is a net gain to the economy.

The Apollo Alliance goes so far as to brag that "renewable energy creates more jobs than coal," as if this were a selling point, as opposed to a sign of lower efficiency. It enthusiastically likens the creation of a "clean energy economy" to "the World War II industrial mobilization."

The analogy is more telling than the alliance realizes: Like a war, the effort to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions may be justified to prevent a more costly outcome. But the economic activity it generates has to be weighed against the destruction it causes, something the president-elect so far has shown no inclination to do.