[JohnInIndy]

Well this guy's last name is green and he does believe in climate change.

Obama's Green-Jobs Fantasies by John Stossel on Creators.com - A Syndicate Of Talent

Anyone who understands basic economics already knows that President Obama's $2.3 billion green-jobs initiative was snake oil. Now, thanks to Kenneth P. Green, we have statistics as well as theory to prove it.
In a new article, "The Myth of GreenEnergy Jobs: The European Experience," the environmental scientist and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute writes, "Green programs in Spain destroyed 2.2 jobs for every green job created, while the capital needed for one green job in Italy could create almost five jobs in the general economy."

[shooz]

The AEI is a front group, plain and simple.
I thought you knew about such things.
Did they mention how many jobs in this country were destroyed by Wallstreet greed?

No? I thought not.

[Ratmagiclady]

Hrm, John Stossel on a self-publishing site... How credible.

The drumbeat of anti-green people is 'If you don't give us unsustainable monopoly, it'll cost *jobs!*

*What* jobs? The ones they outsourced anyway?


You know what the biggest 'green jobs' we could be investing in are?

The home construction sector, that's lost so much work cause there were only so many pewter-tone bathroom fixtures they could sell in a foreclosure crisis.

Something like fourty percent of our personal energy consumptions in America is *waste in the home.*

Think smart people could find a use for a bunch of skilled, but un-or-under-employed *home contractors* in that situation, John?

The Big Oil/corporate conservative line has been a losing equation *anyway,* in *every* respect that wasn't a financial bubble that proved to be a scam.

When you pay Big Oil bailout/subsidy money, or pay your energy bills, that money's gone and needs to be paid next month.

When you insulate a house, or put in something more efficient, or build public transport or even put up a PV cell, or hire people for a Civilian Conservation Corps, the result *stays* a while.

Corporations who think only about money and profit tend to also think that *stuff that lasts is a problem, not a solution.*

For the people, *stuff that lasts is a solution, not a problem.*

So, yes, 'Green Jobs' are a lot better than throwing money at losing equations and more plutocratic ripoffs.

It's pretty hard to outsource your roofing contractor. And you get to keep the roof. Well, as long as the big money people you bailed out and pandered to don't foreclose and blame the liberals.

[Coeurdechene]

You know this is the same type of argument used against the devellopment of clean energy? of course since it's a change of paradigm and the devellopment of new technologies the start will be more costly...but you have to invest if you want those technologies to bloom and those jobs to work.
All this is disguised in economic "rationality", just as the arguments in favor of nuclear energy but it is a biased discussion.
The article starts and pulls throughout all the text authority arguments and discreditations so you incline to agree with them (like "Anyone who understands basic economics" , "as economic logic demonstrates.", "environmental lobby wants Americans to be poorer" or "The advocates of such programs don't just misunderstand economics. They have lapsed into a pre-economic mentality").
It's an old tactic to portray those who you don't agree with as idiots or primitives while using "scientific data" and arguments from biased people like Hayek. Repeating those things like a mantra doesn't make them true.
What this type of article does not consider is the cost of mantaining the present economic and production paradigm, they do not realize it has a long term cost and they still anchored in an old economic paradigm that is presented as the rational and true one. They define richness in a way and believe that any other definition (based on quality of life and not economic growth) is a "pre-economic" thinking.
All of this is very subjective and uses an ample array of eristic dialectics instead of considering the effort to change our ways of producing in it's true light: as a change of economic paradigm that is not benign per-se, that will have shortcommings and mistakes, and a way of thinking that considers other things that classic economy does not. If this was done the tone of the article would be different and it's arguments could be used to improve policies.
Instead it looks more like a rant supporting and excusing the flaws our productive system has. A rant that does not contribute and wich only objective is to keep the things as they are by slandering alternatives without considering present economic system mistakes.

[Ratmagiclady]

Just so, Coeur.

Some people see broken systems, see either 'Perfect' or 'Trash,' .... Me, I tend to see either 'Needs caring for' or 'Parts.

Usually some of both.


(A lot of the issues here are really about some idea that there is some all-or-nothing *belief* that just needs to be *fed* and nothing else need happen. Consume, burn, waste, fight over shifting 'absolutes,' decry the 'relativism' of it all, call it 'balanced' if nothing's *right.' Some stuff's simpler than that. If we were all supposed to think and do the same, we'd be some kind of soft-bodied ants, I'm sure. And if we were supposed to be a bunch of rugged individualist competitive breeders, we'd have sharper teeth and claws and no Frankie Valli songs. )


And it may be a dubiously-effective way to try and corner the market on digital cameras, but as a species, it's time to 'be interesting.'

[reeftool]

Green jobs sound good as a political catch phrase but in reality are few and far between. I have a daughter who recently graduated form college with a degree in Enviromental Studies and hasn't found much available in her field. In the current economic climate, this is the first area that got cut. The NY state DEC had the biggest cuts of any other agency.

[Ratmagiclady]

Green jobs sound good as a political catch phrase but in reality are few and far between. I have a daughter who recently graduated form college with a degree in Enviromental Studies and hasn't found much available in her field. In the current economic climate, this is the first area that got cut. The NY state DEC had the biggest cuts of any other agency.

It doesn't help that the environment is one of the things that the Right is assaulting under pretense of 'budget crises,' certainly: they're actively trying to attack environmental science and protection and regulation and oversight, ...and a lot of the 'green jobs' regarding infrastructure and putting the home improvement sector to work on efficiency refits have been blocked by guess who over the past couple of years.

In spite of all this there *has* been some success getting some new jobs up and running, manufacturing and the rest, (I'd thought it was all pretty much completely blocked, myself. )

I do still worry about science and education budgets across the board, these'd seem to be under wholesale attack in general.

[redrockcoulee]

China has made a plan on becoming a world's super power in the field of green energy. So John is safe in that he can buy his cars made in Japan, get the new energy products from China and that way he does not have to support any success in government initiatives and can assist in keeping American worker's opportunities down and thus lower wages for them as well.

It may be some time before many of the green energy products are fully competitive in the free market place but considering that many of the old energy products are already subsidized by taxpayers and the cost in the future of repairing the damage done by extraction and consumption of those products is going to be extremely great, how bad is attempting to solve problems. Oh yes I know, there should be no restrictions on companies making as much money as they can as fast as they can and the environment or the people really count for nothing. The world is only about profit and making money.

I do know that my employer is trying to be as green as possible (pun intended) and as a result of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars saves the taxpayers of Canada and the United Kingdom millions of dollars or pounds per year.

And in John's original post it states the author is the environmental scientist; does that mean the right wing group has only the one envir scientist or is he the only one in the world? Takes more than one study from a bias group to determine whether or not something is worth while undertaking, especially something that may have more benefit in the long term than the short term time scale.

[ihasa]

If we fail to develop green - or should that be sustainable - industry, we'll just miss out to China who will ultimately gain the economic (and moral) upper hand.

Continuing to base our economies on the assumption that cheap oil will always be available is a folly, as would be postponing the switch to alternative technologies until our competitors are way ahead of us, or until our traditional fossil fuel technologies are collapsing due to problems to do with oil supply.

Even if you put climate change issues aside (and they're probably valid concerns) the case for putting money into new technologies NOW rather than wait until we ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO is very strong.

[reeftool]

Industry in China is far from green and sustainable. One of the reasons they are able to compete on prices is the LACK of environmental standards and regulations. It is going to come back and burn them in a bad way.

[Ratmagiclady]

If we fail to develop green - or should that be sustainable - industry, we'll just miss out to China who will ultimately gain the economic (and moral) upper hand.

Continuing to base our economies on the assumption that cheap oil will always be available is a folly, as would be postponing the switch to alternative technologies until our competitors are way ahead of us, or until our traditional fossil fuel technologies are collapsing due to problems to do with oil supply.

Even if you put climate change issues aside (and they're probably valid concerns) the case for putting money into new technologies NOW rather than wait until we ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO is very strong.

Yep. And the fact is, waiting till we've burned all the readily-available oil or turned it into plastic containers is something that will leave us without some of the most-useful stuff in the Earth for all the other purposes, some of which might turn out to be essential to whatever solutions we come up with.

One thing nobody seems to want to hear in America is that a real key aspect to any of this is to actually *organize our civilization better.* The good news is a lot of our energy consumption isn't actually *making life better,* just wasting. In fact, a lot of it's actually both a pain in the arse, (Like the daily colossal waste of energy involved in commuting in big personal cars, not to mention having to drive through suburban sprawl just to get to a grocery store or whatever) personal expenses going out the window, and in general things which make us unhealthy and frequently just overweight, out of touch, and out of shape.

In fact, a lot of the maladies and malaises of modern life can really be attributed to to so much having been *built* around the profit and influence of a very few, right down to the laments about 'Not enough time for family,' ...All things that the same profit-making few want each individual to take on themselves while trying to win at the contradictions of working longer in cubicles, commuting further to have decent schools and safety cause 'livable cities' somehow isn't a word that excites people as it should, they built huge tracts of suburban sprawl with no village centers, or strangled extant ones with the big-box phenomenon (Big box stores don't have to be inherently awful, but they get way too many advantages over local business and just feed on communities, without even usually helping out with public transportation. )

Basically, people seem to be in the habit of thinking in terms of dismembered objects, issues, piecemeal 'solutions' when the real problems are about *systems.*

The problem isn't any one thing, and contrary to what the fossil fuel and nuclear industries have been saying on the energy part, the solution won't be all in one thing. Waiting on some magic bullet while consumption just keeps rising and proliferating just isn't a winning equation.

For all that things seem intractable, bear in mind that we *do* have enough parts to make things work a whole lot better. Perhaps that's why the corporate influence is getting so heavy-handed.

Combining the old and new is kind of the key. Some things we left behind cause we didn't know how to *use* them. (Or because in many ways they actually sucked. Small farms and towns like that are great, but especially when they're regressive and isolating, a lot of people would want to *leave,* of course, limited opportunities, everyone up in your business all the time and precious little to do if you weren't of a certain bent. Well, now we have the world at our keyboards, you could even telecommute. There's a ton of ways to arrange things around *people,* not money and consumption.

Most of our energy consumption is in fact *wasted:* much of it's in inefficient housing, for instance, and that'd be a great use for a big but sagging home improvement sector. Parts. Systems.

[mikemike]

Statistics rarely "prove" anything, especially not when they are used by a reporter with an agenda.

"Green programs in Spain destroyed 2.2 jobs for every green job created, while the capital needed for one green job in Italy could create almost five jobs in the general economy."

Who would have thunk that you could hire 50 paella chefs with and buy their pans, room service attendants and build a room for them to clean, clerks with some shirts for them to sell, and other "general economy" jobs for every 150 ft tall windmill made out of composites with a 1 MW generator that requires a crew of 10 engineers and workers to design to install.

Spain doesn't have very many traditional fossil fuel resources and if you want to base an energy policy solely on where it is cheapest to produce the fuel, we should just be buying every drop of our oil from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela and quit wasting our time drilling here in America. There is a strategic advantage to having an element of self-reliance even if that means higher energy cost or taking some environmental risks by doing it yourself.

[shooz]

Statistics rarely "prove" anything

Then why do you work with them?

[mikemike]

Then why do you work with them?

Because sometimes they do prove something and even if they don't statistics can be very useful for a variety of purposes which can tolerate a degree of uncertainty inherent with statistical sciences.

Plus I get paid pretty well to do it

[ihasa]

Industry in China is far from green and sustainable. One of the reasons they are able to compete on prices is the LACK of environmental standards and regulations. It is going to come back and burn them in a bad way.

It's not sustainable while they play catch up with mature economies like our own, but with the enormous population they have, they know quite well that they will have to switch tracks to a low carbon, sustainable model at some point, and are hopefully actively planning for that (or we're all doomed). Currently the average Chinese person produces 2.7 tonnes of C02 per year, vs USA at 20.4 tonnes per person. That's twice as much as the UK by the way. And we're a dirty, dirty little country with very little renewable energy. Are you just burning fossil fuels for the sheer fun of it?!