Posted by
Rocky Mountain Foundation on Friday, October 17, 2008 12:00:00 AM
Public policy development is skewed by outrageous claims made by public officials either favoring or disfavoring an energy source. Last October, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter larded up his rhetoric in favor of the so-called “New Energy Economy” with the claim that some 90,000 Colorado jobs had been created by “the renewable energy industry.”
The Ritter claim was lifted from a report out of Boulder from the American Solar Energy Society. Read here what Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages at the Rocky Mountain News, discovered when he “looked beneath the covers” of that promotional report.
Cautionary note to Gov. Ritter: Vladimir Lenin famously said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” A few years later, Adolph Hitler said something similar and his propagandist Joseph Goebbels said, “It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.” Lenin, HItler and Goebbels shouldn’t be your models.