Europe Bets With Ireland-Portugal and America Sees Them and Raises With California - This Will Get Ugly

By Chris Horner on 11.16.10 @ 7:53AM

So the collapse of the increasingly debt-ridden Portugese and Irish economies, and the subsequent bailouts, appear imminent.
Is this a bad time to remind readers that after Spain, touted over and over by President Obama as his model for a 'green economy' -- debt-financed temporary jobs mandating higher energy prices on top -- hurtled toward bankruptcy thanks in great part to that very scheme, the New York Times pivoted to say oh... no... Portugal and Ireland, that's where the success was...yeah, that's it?
And, O' Prop 23-rejecting California, can you hear them now? The sole difference and remaining unknown is that California might possibly be forced to deal with its own mess (with residual harm throughout the US, regardless), with the ant that is the American taxpayer tired of bailing out the silly green grasshopper.
You want gesture politics, spending billions and borrowing billions more, driving up energy costs and dooming your productivity with climatically meaningless green poses, that's fine. But you clean up the mess.
UPDATE: Just so you don't think we are out of the woods in Washington with the death of cap-and-trade, the push here for more Euro-style debt, capitalizing on relief over cap-n-trade's demise, is only accelerating. This is a good piece by London-based Dalibor Rohac reminding us of the coalition pushing it, the folly and the harm.