The "green jobs" agenda is not about employment, but feeding the New Leviathan?

After touting green jobs as the wave of the future, the president and his Congressional allies made sure that the $800 billion stimulus package set aside $70 billion for green-energy projects. Now the results are in, and Obama’s green jobs bet has been a bust. Estimates from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an adjunct of the Department of Energy, show that of the nearly $9 billion that has so far been spent on green jobs, the government created just 910 new, long-term jobs. For those keeping count, that works out to a cost to taxpayers of $9.8 million per job. So dismal is the return on this investment that the Obama administration has taken to reclassifying jobs only tenuously associated with green projects — everything from construction jobs used to install infrastructure for wind and solar operations to janitors who clean those facilities — as “green jobs.”

As if Obama’s record on domestic job creation wasn’t sufficiently damning, much of the funding allocated for green jobs has gone abroad. American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop points out that of the first $2 billion spent on renewable energy projects like wind energy companies, as much as 80 percent flowed overseas to places like China. By far the largest payment went to a bankrupt Australian company that used Japanese-made turbines to build a wind farm in Texas. The government spent yet another $20 million to “help clean energy projects in Africa get started.”

Considering the abject and expensive failure of green jobs, one might well wonder how this pet cause of the environmental left became national policy.