07 August 2009

Pie-In-The-Sky Green Jobs

I suggest you look elsewhere for employment.

Nothing is perhaps more pathetic than the exertions of economic developers and politicians grasping at straws, particularly during hard times . . . All told, green jobs constitute barely 700,000 positions across the country -- less than 0.5% of total employment. That's about how many jobs the economy lost in January this year. . . . Green power is expensive and depends on massive subsidization, with government support levels at roughly 20 times or more per megawatt hour than relatively clean and abundant natural gas. . . . A recent study on renewable energy subsidies on the Spanish economy found that for every "green" job created more than two were lost in the non-subsidized economy.
Ah, unintended consequences. The social planners/economic developers can never account for all of them. This is why government ought to err on the side of less, rather than more regulation of the economy.

(see also "ethanol" & the unintended starvation in lesser developed countries)


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