In the spirit of never letting a crisis go to waste, Obama argued for massive subsidies for renewable energy and wants to use the Gulf oil disaster to shove an “energy and climate” bill, which is to say some form of a carbon tax, down the throats of taxpayers.

Obama touted an increase in green energy-related jobs and other efficiency-related trends in America from the “stimulus,” seeming to forget that those jobs came at a steep cost.  While voluntary gains in efficiency are a good idea, Obama laid out the framework for a boondoggle which could make Obamacare’s costs look small in comparison, saying that renewable energy has the potential to grow our economy “but only if we accelerate that transition, only if we seize the moment.”

He touted the Waxman-Markey “energy and climate” bill and admitted that “there are costs associated with this transition.”  He then argued against claims that we can’t afford the costs by saying we can’t afford not to take on the costs.  In typically progressive style, Obama said the one thing he won’t accept is inaction on this issue, ignoring the obvious fact that doing nothing would be better than implementing a bad plan.

Obama said that he wants to make “clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses.” This is perhaps the most dangerous sentence of his presidency.

There are two ways to make clean energy, which is inherently inefficient with today’s technology, profitable:  one way is to transfer massive amounts of money to inefficient producers of energy, the other is to tax energy-dense fossil fuels so heavily that they become unprofitable.  In either case, the consumer and taxpayer will suffer cost of living increases which make health insurance costs pale in comparison.