Green Jobs and Empty Promises
On Monday, September 19, we growled about Solyndra and the green jobs scam, citing an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily that pointed out there are “a minimum of five green firms going bankrupt” resulting in taxpayers “paying ghastly sums for each green job created.”
If that’s not enough to roil your blood, Human Events reports the “top 10 green job fiascoes,” only some of which have we growled about here. Of course, it’s not easy defining just what is a green job. According to a report from Fox News:
“In a series of tense exchanges, Republicans on a House oversight panel sharply questioned whether the Obama administration was looking to inflate the number of "green" jobs by using a broad definition -- which, as it turns out, counts virtually anybody working in mass transit.”
Fox News also wrote that “Republicans said the working term the government is using is far too broad, suggesting officials were trying to pad the figures.”
Nicolas Loris of the Heritage Foundation makes four points at their blog, The Foundry, to keep in mind when discussing green jobs:
- Government spending does not create jobs.
- Jobs per unit of energy produced does not measure the economic desirability of an energy source.
- Environmental regulations don’t create jobs, either.
- Green jobs have been expensive.
Finally, at Power Line blog, John Hinderaker points readers to a “superb piece by the House Budget Committee.” He writes the Budget Committee report “reviews the history of failure that such efforts have universally encountered both in the U.S. and abroad; explains the reasons why government “investment” in political favored industries is a bad idea; and outlines more efficient energy policies. The piece is an excellent primer on crony capitalism and why it should be avoided.”
With environmentalists running around talking about solar and wind “renewable energy,” the report includes a chart showing the loopy logic in thinking that solar and wind will replace fossil sources any time soon. According to the Budget Committee’s report:
“In 2007, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) conducted an analysis of subsidies received by both alternative and conventional energy sources. On a dollar-per-unit-of-production basis, the level of subsidies received by the wind and solar industries were almost 100 times greater than those for conventional energy.”
The report also reports that total subsidies for the so-called renewable energy "rose from $5.1 billion in 2007 to $14.7 billion in 2010." Here’s the chart of federal electric subsidies per unit of production.
Sure make you wonder how much of Al Gore’s global warming Kool Aid the Arlington County Board drank to conceive of their Community Energy Plan (CEP), not to mention what the CEP will cost Arlington businesses and taxpayers.