The Green Jobs Engine
That Cant
Inefficient
eco-friendly technologies destroy more jobs than they create.
City Journal /The Manhattan Institute
Max Schulz
Winter 2009
This is written by a staunch liberal, and
published by a liberal publication. In another article called Obama’s California Dreamin’ The
writer takes Obama to task on an environmental decision he made waiving emission
standards in California. We point this
out to show this writer is no conservative at all. There is too much in the
article that is well written exposing the lies and deceit in this whole
doctrine of having a green revolution.
During the 2008 presidential
campaign, Barack Obama promised to transform
In a time of grave economic uncertainty, it’s surely positive news
that we can agree on the benefits of green jobs, right? Not quite. If the
green-jobs claim sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. Holding it
up to the light exposes it as economically hollow. Making matters worse, a
powerful green-jobs movement has emerged, made up of left-wing antipoverty
activists and union leaders, all of them clamoring for a more conventional kind
of green: government dollars.
What exactly is a “green job,”
anyway? The definition seems maddeningly vague. According to Time, “if
you make wind turbines or solar panels, your job is reliably green.” But the
American Solar Energy Society (ASES), a leading proponent of the cause, says
that green employment isn’t reserved for scientists and researchers; the
industry also needs “project managers, accountants, assemblers, IT
professionals, customer service reps, marketing professionals and account
executives.” ASES estimates that more than 8 million people already work in the
field of renewable energy and energy efficiency, and it predicts that figure to
quadruple by 2030. But ASES acknowledges that no real standards exist for what
constitutes a green job, so these numbers are fuzzy. Work in an
energy-intensive smelting plant producing steel for a wind turbine, and you
might wind up in the green-jobs column, despite the belching pollution.
According to the Political Economy Research Institute, a left-wing think tank,
even truck driving could be green, since long-haulers “will be in demand to
transport wind turbines as well as switchgrass and
woodchips for biofuels.”
Obama
has yet to provide much in the way of particulars on his green-jobs agenda,
though he has proposed a “renewable portfolio standard” that would require 25
percent of our electricity to come from clean sources—a move that would boost
demand for windmills, solar farms, and other clean but expensive technologies
(clean nuclear power, reviled by environmental groups, would be excluded).
Obama has also announced a massive new national-infrastructure and public-works
agenda that would foster green jobs.
The
paucity of details to date isn’t surprising. For all the talk about green-job
creation, there’s an unavoidable problem with renewable-energy technologies and
the policies that promote them: from an economic
standpoint, they’re big losers. Renewables can’t
produce the large volumes of useful, reliable energy that our economy needs at
attractive prices. Government subsidizes renewables
because—all things being equal—the free market won’t. In many cases, these
subsidies amount to little more than welfare for companies and industries with
political connections.
The
green subsidies are considerable. The U.S. Energy
Information Administration reported in early 2008 that the government
subsidizes solar energy at $24.34 per megawatt-hour (MWh)
and wind power at $23.37. Yet
even with decades of these massive handouts, as well as numerous state-level
mandates for utilities to use green power, wind and solar energy contribute
less than one-half of 1 percent of our nation’s electricity. Compare the green energy subsidies to the energy sources
reviled by environmentalists, such as natural gas (25 cents per MWh in subsidies), coal (44 cents), hydroelectricity (67
cents), and nuclear power ($1.59). With relatively little government
largesse, these sources (along with oil, which undergirds
transportation) do the heavy lifting in our energy economy.
The
alternative technologies at the heart of Obama’s plan, relying on more such
government handouts and mandates, will inevitably raise energy prices—and high
power prices are job killers. Industries that make physical products, whether
cars or chemicals or paper cups, are energy-intensive and will gravitate to
low-energy-cost locales—which is why California and New York, with some of the
highest electricity prices in the country, have lost manufacturing jobs in droves.
But it’s not just manufacturers that need cheap electricity: Google, the poster
child of
Keep in
mind, too, that the traditional industries currently supplying Americans with
reliable, affordable energy already employ millions of workers. The American
Petroleum Institute reports that the oil and gas industry employs 1.6 million
Americans. Coal mining directly and indirectly supports hundreds of thousands
of jobs, according to the National Mining Association and the U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics. A radical plan to transform our energy economy in favor of
clean, renewable energy technologies would put many of those men and women out
of work.
But won’t all those new green jobs make up for whatever economic
hardship results? That’s the contention of New York Times columnist
Thomas Friedman, among the best-known and most influential evangelists for a
green economy. In his most recent bestseller, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We
Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America, Friedman argues that
a government-directed green program would rebuild America’s national strength
and bolster our economy for the twenty-first century—regardless of whether
global warming turns out to be a serious problem (which he believes it is).
Friedman likens his proposal to training for the Olympic triathlon. “If you
make it to the Olympics, you have a much better chance of winning, because
you’ve developed every muscle,” he writes. “If you don’t make it to the Olympics,
you’re still healthier, stronger, fitter, and more likely to live longer and
win every other race in life.”
It’s a nice analogy, but Friedman,
like Obama, sees only the upside. Danish economist Bjørn
Lomborg, author of books like The
Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, which decries climate-change
alarmism, agrees that global warming is real and man-made, but he differs with
Friedman’s response. “It is foolish to deny climate change,” says Lomborg. “But it’s also foolish to deny climate economics,
which Friedman does.” Lomborg notes that Friedman’s
argument “simply fails to address the cost of his proposed solutions, and fails
to weigh those costs against the benefits.”
Obama and Friedman have become the
latest proponents of a common economic fallacy. One version holds that the
Second World War and its aftermath were a boon for the American and European
economies, since militarizing in
Such thinking was effectively
debunked a century before World War II. The nineteenth-century French economist
Frédéric Bastiat made an
invaluable contribution to modern economics by demolishing the notion that a
broken window is a good thing inasmuch as it provides work for the glazier. As Bastiat observed, the money that goes to pay the glassmaker
would, had the window never been broken at all, have supported some other
productive enterprise. Society as a whole winds up poorer, even if the
glassmaker profits.
With his
promise of 5 million new green jobs, Barack Obama
heaves a brick straight through Bastiat’s window.
Yesterday’s glazier is tomorrow’s solar-panel installer. The green-jobs promise
amounts to killing jobs in efficient industries to create jobs in inefficient
ones—hardly a recipe for economic success. William Pizer,
a researcher with Resources for the Future and a lead author of the most recent
report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
reinforced the point at a symposium last April: “As an economist, I am
skeptical that [dealing with climate change] is going to make money. You’ll
have new industries, but they’ll be doing what old industries did but [at] a
higher net cost. . . . You’ll be depleting other industries.” Consumers will be
hurt, too, Pizer notes. Digging deeper each month to
pay for expensive renewable energy, they will have less to save or spend in
other areas of the economy.
There
may be legitimate arguments for taking dramatic steps to fight climate change.
Boosting the economy isn’t one of them.
Higher costs and job losses aren’t
the only drawbacks of the green-jobs push. We also must contend with a
burgeoning activist movement that is mobilizing around the idea of a green
economy. Many of these activists come from self-styled environmental
organizations, but some aren’t typical environmentalists in any sense of the
word. These unlikely eco-cadres—largely composed of labor union officials and
inner-city community organizers—appear far less interested in protecting the environment
than in agitating for “economic justice” and airing ethnic, racial, and other
grievances.
That was
the case with many of the participating organizations involved in the
nationwide Green Jobs Now National Day of Action last September. The list of partner
organizations reads like a roll call of left-wing activism. Most of the major
environmental organizations were there, such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club,
and the Natural Resources Defense Council, along with many lesser-known groups.
But so were numerous decidedly non-environmental outfits, including the
well-known Acorn, MoveOn, and Codepink.
Color of Change—an organization “dedicated to strengthening Black America’s
political voice”—was on hand, as was the Hip Hop Caucus. Democracia
Inner-city
Dellums had help from an Oakland-based community activist named
Van Jones, who played a large role in persuading Congress to pass a Green Jobs
Act in 2007 that will soon start funneling more than $125 million to
antipoverty and environmental groups across the country. Jones is perhaps the
leading proponent of harnessing the green-jobs wave to benefit low- or
no-skilled candidates, many with troubled backgrounds. A relentless
self-promoter, he has had a hand in starting or directing many of the
best-known green-jobs advocacy groups: Green for All,
the Apollo Alliance, Color for Change, and the
Reading
Jones’s book or the many interviews he has given, one gets the impression that
he is passionately committed to the environment. He talks up the need for a
“green New Deal,” for instance, that will “help our Rust Belt cities blossom as
If Jones
and his compatriots in the green-jobs movement truly wanted to help poor
minorities, they might start by taking a long, hard look at the history of
government-run job-training programs. In terms of money wasted, skills not
imparted, and opportunities lost, the history of such programs is abysmal.
“Many, if not most, of the participants in federal jobs and job-training
programs would be better off today if the programs had never existed,” observes
journalist James Bovard, who has written extensively
on the failures of job-training efforts. “The primary beneficiaries of federal
jobs programs have been the legions of social workers, consultants, and
‘manpower experts’ that have made a good living off these flounderings
for 25 years.” Bovard made those remarks in 1986;
they are no less relevant today.
It would be comforting to think
that the new Community-Organizer-in-Chief has better sense on the green economy
than his
Max Schulz is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s
Center for Energy Policy and the Environment.