The second miracle is economic. Obama promises us that his transformation by fiat of our fundamental energy economy will not only cost us nothing in the long term, but will actually make us gobs of money in the form of so-called “green jobs.”

The rationale of this leap of logic goes like this: economic productivity is often associated with a lot of activity and spending, therefore anything that forces people to scramble and spend must be economically productive.

This is, of course, the same logic that dullards employ when they say that hurricanes stimulate the economy. True, the hurricane will stimulate spending by forcing the newly destitute and homeless to tap into their savings or common subsidy (i.e. other peoples’ savings) to rebuild their lives in a hurry, but this is not true economic productivity since, at best, it gets the afflicted back to where they were before the disaster, but with substantially less money in the bank and many months of their life gone in the process.

If such forced spending were really economically productive then we could build the wealthiest society on earth by forcing all Americans to live in elaborate cardboard shanties on barrier islands. One good hurricane season and just think of the spending! Such an arrangement might also cut down on the costs of Social Security, but I digress.

Just as absurdly, Hurricane Barack assures us that all the expense, subsidy, tax, labor, construction, threatening, fining, capping, trading, cajoling, and regulation that will go into his plans to save us from “expensive and unreliable” supplies of fossil fuels will actually stimulate our economy – while he simultaneously saves us even more money by transitioning the country to alternative energies so inexpensive and reliable that people will not choose to use them unless forced to at tax-point.

I have no doubt that attempting to force the world economy to energy sources about as practical as fuel cells powered by drier lint and banana peels will create a lot of jobs, but like those created to clean up after a hurricane they will not be productive jobs – unless you’re the one that gets the contract for them in which case you will find them very productive. The larger economy, however, will just see savings burned and productive activity crowded out of the hunt for labor and capital.

Here’s a little secret about truly productive jobs: they don’t need a subsidy to get created. They don’t need an act of Congress for someone to start them. Productive jobs arise spontaneously because they pay for themselves without the do-gooder-in-chief ordering us to make them.

The fact that these anemic green jobs cannot arise without the full faith, credit, and enforcement apparatus of the federal government shows how productive they must be. What they will be, in fact, is the environmentalist equivalent of the old economists’ joke about how any government can achieve full employment for its population: it could pay half the population to dig holes, and the other half to fill them – and this doesn’t even count the high-paying jobs that would be created in shovel manufacturing!

Obama’s energy plans use the power of government to create an enormous green hole in energy supplies (through taxation, regulation, lack of access etc.), then it uses the power of government to pay people to fill these green holes with less affordable, less practical, but more fashionable alternatives.

This is entirely different from authentic and spontaneous economic transformations – for example the transformation from ecologically-costly biofuels like wood and whale oil to ecologically-safer fossil fuels like coal and oil. Real transformations pay for themselves and add productivity by freeing up money, labor, or resources that can be used elsewhere in the economy.

The digging and filling of green holes does not exactly meet this standard.

But don’t worry, while the government is picking technological winners and losers in the name of greenness, real innovation, involving unexpected technologies that haven’t yet caught the attention of the bumper-sticker-on-the-Volvo set will be invented and eventually adopted – assuming they aren’t ignored, banned, crowded out or simply buried in the massive economic grave of all these green holes we’re digging.