By Chris Horner, Pajamas Media

Spain’s Dr. Gabriel Calzada - the author of a damning study concluding that Spain’s “green jobs” energy program has been a catastrophic economic failure - was mailed a dismantled bomb on Tuesday by solar energy company Thermotechnic.

Says Calzada:

Before opening it, I called [Thermotechnic] to know what was inside...they answered, it was their answer to my energy pieces.

Dr. Calzada contacted a terrorism expert to handle the package. The expert first performed a scan of the package, then opened it in front of a journalist, Dr. Calzada, and a private security expert.

The terrorism consultant said he had seen this before: This time you receive unconnected pieces. Next time it can explode in your hands.

Dr. Calzada added: [The terrorism expert] told me that this was a warning.

The bomb threat is just the latest intimidation Dr. Calzada has faced since releasing his report and following up with articles in Expansion (a Spanish paper similar to the Financial Times). A minister from Spain’s Socialist government called the rector of King Juan Carlos University - Dr. Calzada’s employer - seeking Calzada’s ouster. Calzada was not fired, but he was stripped of half of his classes at the university. The school then dropped its accreditation of a summer university program with which Calzada’s think tank - Instituto Juan de Mariana - was associated.

Additionally, the head of Spain’s renewable energy association and the head of its communist trade union wrote opinion pieces in top Spanish newspapers accusing Calzada of being “unpatriotic” - they did not charge him with being incorrect, but of undermining Spain by daring to write the report.

Their reasoning? If the skepticism that Calzada’s revelations prompted were to prevail in the U.S., Spanish industry would face collapse should U.S. subsidies and mandates dry up.

As I have previously reported at PJM (here and here), Spain’s “green jobs” program was repeatedly referenced by President Obama as a model for what he would like to implement in the United States. Following the release of Calzada’s report, Spain’s Socialist government has since acknowledged the debacle - both privately and publicly. This month, Spain’s government instituted massive reductions in subsidies to “renewable” energy sources.

Calzada is a friend of mine, kindly writing a blurb for the jacket of my latest book: Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America. My book details the Spanish “green jobs” disaster uncovered by Dr. Calzada, plus similar “green” economic calamities occurring in Germany and Denmark - also programs Obama has praised - as well as in Italy and elsewhere.

As I detail in Power Grab, they felt Spain would be in a dire position without the U.S. playing the role of sucker. With today’s revelation, now we know just how far the “green energy” lobby will go to keep the money flowing. See post here.

Click here for coverage on this incident from Spanish media.

By Sen. David Vitter

It’s been more than two months since oil started flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, and as folks along the Gulf Coast continue to deal with the personal, economic and environmental effects of this tragedy, I’m alarmed some in Washington have seized upon this very real and ongoing crisis as an opportunity to further their political agendas.

Instead of real solutions, in typical Washington fashion, the policies following this spill are not solutions at all, but setbacks for people all along the coast. Some of my Senate colleagues and this administration have used the spill as an excuse to place a moratorium on offshore drilling - a decision that would destroy tens of thousands of jobs in the Gulf as energy companies move their businesses away from the coast. This decision isn’t helping Louisianians - it’s shutting down huge parts of our economy and will only cost us more jobs and more economic devastation.

Fortunately, just this week a federal district judge issued a ruling blocking the moratorium. I applaud this common-sense decision, which recognizes that the president’s powers are certainly not unlimited and that this moratorium is wreaking havoc on jobs in Louisiana. And I hope that, even though the administration plans to appeal the ruling, higher courts will recognize that the moratorium was a bad decision and the wrong response to the oil spill. The best way to prevent future oil spills is not to stop drilling altogether, but to improve the inspection process to ensure that our rigs are safe.

Liberals have also capitalized on this tragedy as an excuse to raid the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund - money intended to pay for damages caused by an oil spill - to pay for new government spending instead. Their proposal would dramatically raise taxes for the trust fund and then double-count those same dollars to pay for a grab bag of deficit spending. Stealing money from the trust fund to pay for their own runaway government spending is another sad example of the same old Washington politics, and the American people are sick of it. That’s why I introduced an amendment to prevent the money in the trust fund from being used to offset other unrelated expenditures in the federal budget and mask the full impact to the deficit.

Perhaps most outrageous of all, the Senate recently rejected an effort to keep the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from moving forward with one of the most significant economy-destroying regulations in the history of this country - cap-and-tax.  Such a move would make energy more expensive and jobs scarcer, putting a tremendous burden on American families who are already struggling to make ends meet. And it would particularly hurt Louisiana because our economy is so dependent on oil and gas production. Yet proponents reference the catastrophe off our coast as justification for it all as they try to use this tragic oil spill as an opportunity to let a handful of bureaucrats at the EPA decide our economic future.

President Barack Obama has made clear he supports such a cap-and-tax system - a system that would limit America’s sovereignty by giving control of a major part of our economy to other nations who do not have our best interests in mind. Previous international treaties like the Kyoto Protocol have proven unenforceable, and there is no reason to believe this time would be any different. But the administration and its allies in Congress continue to push this ill-advised policy, and this time, they’re trying to exploit the disaster off the coast of Louisiana to push their radical agenda.

Louisianians deserve more than the use of the ongoing tragedy in the Gulf to force job-killing policies on them. This is a time for the federal government to focus on solving the crisis at hand, and I will continue to fight against any efforts by my colleagues or this administration to use it as a mechanism to create policies that will shut down huge parts of our economy. See Hill post here.

Sen. Vitter is a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee.