In an important action defending freedom of speech on the Internet, the U.S. Court of Appeals has struck down an attempt by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to impose its will on the nation’s largest Internet provider.

For all that has been said about the advances in the capacity of Internet search engines to aid in research, a recently discovered anomaly in Google is raising new questions about the objectivity of the searches it provides.

While President Obama travels around the United States touting “green energy” as the solution to the nation’s spiraling energy costs, the wind farms of the Pacific Northwest are proving once again that alternative energy sources are having a hard time living up to the praise lavished on them.

The crisis at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant in the aftermath of the magnitude 9 earthquake on March 11 has had aftershocks of its own around the globe. Predictably, whenever there is an incident involving a nuclear power plant, politicians will scramble to call for new safety measures, new inspections, and call into question the entire role of nuclear power in meeting the energy needs of a burgeoning global population. Such posturing will undoubtedly delay efforts to meet power consumption needs throughout the developed world, but for the Germans, the fallout from Fukushima will now include the nation’s abandonment of nuclear power altogether.

Last May, as the president was trying to find any jobs saved or created by the hundreds of billions spent as part of the so-called Recovery act, Mr. Obama pointed to a solar panel production company in California as one of his “success” stories. In fact, Obama described Solyndra as a model for the whole future of the “green economy”: “The promise of clean energy isn’t just an article of faith... It’s not just some abstract possibility for science fiction movies or a distant future or 10 years down the road or 20 years, it’s happening right now. The future is here.”

Have you been watching the nation’s economy continue to unravel and wondering where all of that stimulus money went? Another $400 million of the $787 billion approved last February in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act have been accounted for, this time at the federal Energy Department. Why did the Energy Department receive these funds? To support technological research that, in many cases, is so speculative that it apparently cannot attract private venture capital.

With the ink barely dry on the resignation letter of self-proclaimed one-time communist Van Jones as President Obama’s Green Jobs Czar, the USA Today is reporting that one area of the “green economy” that is faltering is its virtual mascot: solar power.

If the Green Climate Fund (GCF) has its way, its actions will — like those of the United Nations — soon be considered to be above the laws of the nations of the world. While critics question the wisdom of investing any governmental body with such a lack of accountability, these criticisms take on a new urgency when one considers the fact that the GCF is not even a part of the UN.

Germany — once a global leader in the race for reliance on “alternative” forms of energy — has discovered that no amount of environmentalist ideology can alter the fundamental laws of economics. Although wind and solar “farms” have been the recipients of lavish government subsidies throughout the European Union, the German government is now being forced to concede it cannot continue supporting solar power at the levels that had quickly become customary, and is dramatically reducing its solar energy subsidy.

With the time counting down to the next United Nations conference on “sustainable development,” a new report recently published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) clearly indicates that the UN’s approach to the entire topic is to expand the power of government to regulate and control all levels of economic development throughout the world.