The US list of latter-day energy anxieties has a new item: labor. With Americans losing jobs faster than at any time in decades, the Obama administration proposes to make work by spending heavily on noncommercial energy. The products of this binge will be called “green jobs.”Reasons for the recent proliferation of energy worries vary: environmental alarm; the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; the oil-price zoom that ended last July. Earlier, energy received too little attention in national politics. Now the government acts like it wants to make up for lost time.The concerns beget hopes that beget policy proposals that need assessment more systematic than what they’re re...