Buried inside The New Yorker‘s profile of Peter Orszag, Obama’s budget director, is this stunning paragraph:

Obama’s White House is filled with former members of Congress and congressional staffers. They are legislative strategists and dealmakers, and these days they often use the phrase “grand bargain” when asked how they expect to achieve their ambitious agenda. The senior White House official told me that they were exploring an energy deal that would include a “serious” and “short-term” increase in domestic production””perhaps opening up for oil exploration places like the waters off the coast of California“”that would appease the “Drill, baby, drill” crowd, while also adopting a cap-and-trade plan that could take effect one or two (or more) years after 2012, which is when Obama’s current plan would start. “You need to have something like T. Boone Pickens and Al Gore holding hands on a broad compromise,” the official said. Such a plan wouldn’t look much like the one in Obama’s budget proposal””more like a third cousin than like a sibling, let alone a twin””but, unlike his current plan, it could get through Congress.

Wow!  Hard to know where to start a response.

First, this “Senior White House official” doesn’t strike me as somebody who knows bloody much about energy or climate or the environment.

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Capitol Words “lets you see what are the most popular words spoken by lawmakers on the House and Senate floor.”  It uses the Congressional Record to give “you an at-a-glance view of which issues lawmakers address on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis,” by “Congress as a whole, by state delegation or by specific lawmaker” including trends over time.

Who says “Kyoto” the most?  Why that would be Sen. James Inhofe (R-OIL), 94 times in the past two years — more than double that of the next 9 members combined.  In second place, way behind, is John Kerry (D-MA) with a mere 16.

“IPCC“?  Inhofe 87 times, next 9 members combined, 48.  Kind of sobering since the IPCC is supposed to be a body whose work is cited by those seeking to advance climate action in this country (see “Has the IPCC rendered itself irrelevant?“)

But I seriously doubt you’ll guess which member of Congress has used the phrase “cap-and-trade” most.  Or “caribou.”  Or “hell.”

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In a new letter, an official from the region powering Spain’s renewable industry calls “completely untrue” a study critical of green jobs in his country being promoted today by the Heritage Foundation. The study, from the libertarian think tank Fundacion Juan de Mariana, argued that “for every green job created [in Spain], 2.2 jobs are lost.” Before today’s Heritage event, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Fox News, Western Business Roundtable, National Review, and the American Enterprise Institute have all cited this Spanish study. However, José María Roig Aldasoro, the Regional Minister of Innovation, Enterprise and Employment for the Government of Navarre responds that green investment “has created wealth, employment and technological development” in Spain:

An article was published recently which has placed a doubt in renewable energy’s ability to create employment; it states that it destroys employment, and therefore, is a factor in the social impoverishment of a country. As I will demonstrate, this statement is completely untrue. In Navarre, the development of renewable energies, and above all wind energy, has created wealth, employment and technological development, and I can assert that this can be achieved in any other region or country.

Aldasoro explains the actual history of green job creation in Navarre:

– 1994: Unemployment at 12.8%, first wind farm erected.

– 1998: Unemployment at 10%, 100 installed megawatts of wind power.

– 2001: Unemployment at 6.8%, two R&D and worker-training centers are opened.

– 2007: Unemployment of 4.76%, total of 100 new renewable-energy companies created, representing 5% of total GDP.

The report relies on bad numbers, grossly underestimating that Spain’s renewable program created only 50,000 jobs, when official estimates are 188,000. Indeed, the study is claiming that “government spending on renewable energy is less than half as efficient at job creation as private-sector spending,” the Wall Street Journal’s Keith Johnson explains. Critics neglect to say that “Spain’s support for renewable energy came out of existing tax revenues,” so “it’s hard to see how it could have edged out private-sector spending, especially when the Socialist government there has reduced corporate income-tax rates, most recently this past January.”

Yet the Heritage Foundation chose to host the author of this flawed report, Dr. Gabriel Calzada, at an event entitled “Busting the Myth of Green Jobs.” Calzada was joined by Robert Murphy, from the Institute for Energy Research, a fossil-fuel industry think tank, and York College professor William T. “Tom” Bogart, who co-authored a paper for the Institute of Energy Research that called green jobs a “Ponzi scheme.” Heritage, which recently compared green economic reform to Nazi-Soviet collectivism, is continuing its slide into irrelevance.

The reality is that investment in renewable energy sectors creates millions more jobs than does investment in traditional energy sectors, because investment can flow into employing people instead of extracting fuel to burn. The Apollo Alliance reports that “renewable energy creates more jobs than coal: the same investment creates 50% more jobs in wind and in solar than in coal. Energy efficiency is far more labor intensive than generation, creating 21.5 jobs for every $1 million invested, compared to 11.5 jobs for new natural gas generation.” According to a Greenpeace International and European Renewable Energy Council study, building a green economy that would cut United States greenhouse emissions by 45% by 2030 would create a net 7.8 million jobs versus business as usual.

Download the complete letter from Navarre Minister Aldasoro.

The Heritage Foundation held a panel [today] titled “Busting the Myth of Green Jobs” to show that the experience of Spain is “more a cautionary tale than a blueprint for success.” Instead of showcasing the views of unbiased academics and economists, the Heritage Foundation put forth a panel of individuals financially connected to ExxonMobil.

Conservatives hate the notion of green clean energy jobs because their entire anti-science, anti-climate, anti-environment message is built around the (false) notion of a trade-off between reducing pollution and jobs (see “Mything in action: Why conservatives hate green clean energy jobs“).  If you don’t care about the health and well-being of future generations, you certainly don’t care if they have good jobs (or any jobs, for that matter).

President Obama has cut through conservative myths better than anyone: “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 allow climate change to wreak unnatural havoc across the landscape, or we can create jobs working to prevent its worst effects….  The nation that leads the world in creating new energy sources will be the nation that leads the 21st-century global economy.”

The Heritage Foundation, the leading think tank of the conservative movement stagnation, is so retrograde that they even oppose energy efficiency.  They are conservatives who don’t want to conserve anything except a status quo that is inherently unsustainable.  And so it is no surprise that Heritage held a panel today, “Busting the Myth of Green Jobs.”  And it is no surprise that they are pushing a study about the Spanish experience that the Regional Minister of Innovation, Enterprise and Employment for the Government of Navarre has debunked (see here and below).  Perhaps the only surprise is that Heritage couldn’t find a researcher who wasn’t bought and paid for by ExxonMobil, as the researchers at Media Matters documented in a post first published here:

The Entire Heritage Foundation Panel Received Money From ExxonMobil

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Here Comes the Sun

Buoyed by the potential promise of a green economy, Mr. Klebensberger, who heads the American branch of SolarWorld AG, a company based in Bonn, Germany, is ramping up production of solar cells in a retrofitted factory that had its grand opening last October “” in the teeth of the financial crisis.

SolarWorld’s plant here [Hillsboro, OR], which makes enough cells to fit 1,700 solar panels a day, is the biggest of its kind in the United States….

THE United States lost its status as the world’s leading solar manufacturer in the 1990s as interest surged elsewhere. Now it makes little more than 5 percent of solar panels worldwide….

Thank you Reagan, Gingrich and other conservatives for gutting our leadership in what is certain to be one of the major job-creating industries of the century! (see “U.S. left in dust, having invented solar PV technology” and “Why Anti-wind McCain had to deliver his climate remarks at a foreign wind company” and”Why other countries kick our butt on clean energy: A primer“)

Even as some of the weaker solar companies resort to layoffs, a number of big names “” including Schott, First Solar, SunPower and Sharp “” are building, expanding or looking to build manufacturing plants in the United States. Sanyo, the Japanese electronics company, is building a solar wafer factory in Salem, Oregon’s capital, that is to begin production this fall.

Thank you stimulus, progressive Congress, and team Obama!  (see “First quarter cleantech VC funding still hits $1 billion “” green stimulus funds soar to $400 billion“).

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There he goes again — making that link between global warming and extreme weather that the climate deniers hate (see “Why do the deniers try to shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather?“).

It looks like President Obama, the horse whisperer of American politics, is finally going to weigh neigh in to get the mudders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee galloping to the finish line.

For people who haven’t been paying close attention, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) keeps dropping bigger and bigger hints that President Obama is not going to get a climate bill on his desk this year (Reid: Senate to wait for House cap-and-trade bill, effectively delaying final bill until 2010. Here’s why that should be good news).

Reid was asked Friday what issue was his biggest concern from now until the 2010 elections.  Greenwire (subs. req’d) reported his answer:

Global warming. … Health care is easier than this global warming stuff.

The bigger question now is — Can the House even pass its big energy and climate bill before the August break?  There are two big reasons why that is no more than a 50-50 proposition right now — and one big reason why a final climate bill is all but inevitable.  Let’s start with the first two reasons:

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