by John Fund
National Review Online

Oregon governor John Kitzhaber may have announced that he will resign, but a sweeping FBI investigation of him and his fiancée, Cylvia Hayes, is only getting started. While the story involves personal failings, the green-energy lobbying scandal that brought them down has national lessons and implications. If oil companies and pharmaceutical concerns shouldn’t exercise undue influence in government, the same is true for green energy — which can’t yet survive in the marketplace without giant subsidies or special tax favors…

More scandals might be waiting in the wings. Last year, the Daily Caller reported that Kitzhaber signed a deal with the governors of Washington and California to implement low-carbon fuel standards that would raise the cost of transportation. But that may have been just the beginning of a much bigger scheme to push green-energy agendas. Chris Horner, of the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, used Freedom of Information Act requests to unearth a ten-page 2013 e-mail thread from the Washington governor’s office to allies working in various other governors’ offices. The thrust was advice on how to launch “a nationally coordinated, multi-year ‘states strategy’ focused on driving outcomes contemplated by the president’s climate action plan,” to “spread climate coordination and collaboration.”

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