In his campaign to increase renewable energy use in the United States by government fiat, President Obama often points to Spain as a “green jobs success story.” Here’s the part of the story Obama doesn’t mention: If the United States follows Spain’s decade-long lead, we’ll need massive government subsidies to keep renewable energy companies afloat. Worse yet, each new “green” job will come at the expense of at least two old jobs in the private sector, according to a blockbuster study led by Gabriel Calzada, economics professor at King Juan Carlos University in Madrid.

When Calzada and his team published the study, they were publicly denounced as unpatriotic for questioning their country’s “solar revolution.” But the Spanish government itself quietly admitted on April 20 that the growing deficit created by solar subsidies jeopardized the financial stability of Spain’s entire power industry. When the government was forced to reduce the subsidies by 30 percent and put a cap on new solar plant construction, “the whole sector collapsed,” Calzada said in an editorial board meeting with The Examiner. Without ever-increasing subsidies, he explained, Spain’s renewable energy industry simply is not economically feasible.