politics not process

How far and how systemic is the fraud of green energy?  This report on the findings of Ontario's Auditor General offers both insight and depressing clarity:

• The Auditor-General leaves little to the imagination in his incisive dissection of the government’s top-down, to-hell-with-economics power trip. Even the Cabinet appears to be an after-thought. 
• In a pointed note at the beginning of comments on renewables, the AG highlights the wilful neglect that continues to dominate electricity policy. “We did not rely on the Ministry [of Energy]’s internal audit service team to reduce the extent of our audit work because it had not recently conducted any audit on renewable energy initiatives.
• No economic analysis or business case had been prepared.
• In the belief that politics can defy economics, politicians all over the world are making the big bet that they can overturn the hard rules of supply and demand, the role of prices and the limits of innovation by pushing the right policy buttons. 
• For a decade to come, Ontario will likely have surplus electricity. Under contracts signed with green-energy producers and others, the government will pay electricity generators billions of dollars to not produce electricity.

Ideology and political manipulation of scientific data are mainstays of ecomyths.  A certain absence of transparency also is common.  But the green energy fraud has reached new heights in the abuse of due process and concomitant assertion of dogma:

• Mr. McGuinty’s green dream has rapidly become an $8-billion nightmare for Ontario taxpayers and electricity users. Almost no new net power will be generated by all the green-energy projects hastily funded since the bill was passed, but the average residential consumer will see more than $400 a year added to his power bill for a decade to pay for all the bad contracts with and subsidies to eco-friendly power suppliers.
• ...the whole scheme was largely designed by environmentalists and green-industry lobbyists — “stakeholders” in the government’s euphemistic rhetoric.

Ontario recently had an election.  The perpetrators of Ontario's green energy commitment were re-elected.  On the surface this would suggest a political mandate in support of their ideas and program.  This is not the case.  Not only did the majority of the electorate not vote for the party that "won" the election, a problem arises from the fact that the use of the franchise is only one check and balance that presumes the government is already in compliance with it's own rules, procedures and processes.  As the Auditor's report spells out, in Ontario at least, the government is completely by-passing even its own cabinet, the house and the party to assert the dictatorial fetishes of an inner elite headed by the Premier.  This is not democracy, it is eco-fascism alive and assertive.

Update:  
Rex Murphy discusses how the situation in Ontario happened.  He concludes:

• Green is the easiest virtue. All it takes in most cases for politicians is simply to say the word often enough and whatever they propose — for a time — gets a pass.
• ...that’s where this green obsession leads. It promotes a policy on its moral virtues, not on its real-life impact. 
• It also has one other feature that politicians are totally unable to resist: Being totally green, they are able, for once, to posture as forward thinking, daring, innovative — even risk-taking — leaders, champions of the Earth, saviours of “the children.” They get to play Superman and Boy Scout at the same time.

And this picture was published showing a windmill bursting into flames as a result of high winds:

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.