Green Jobs: Dream of the Retarded

Nothing makes Ali giggle more than a good article shooting down the child-like dreams of the Green Left. There's a real belly-hugger of an article today in frontpagemagazine.com. Click title for full story.

Obama’s “Green jobs” adviser Van Jones has presented this leftist agenda as a panacea for all of society’s problems: “We imagine formerly incarcerated people moving from jail cells to solar cells—helping to harvest the sun, heal the land, and repair our souls.”

Ha ha! From jail cells to solar cells. Does anyone in this administration have BRAIN cells?

"Check out this sucka from the Operations Control Center calling me about Air Turbine 72-13a being down! I'm on my lunch break, baby!"



These people really know their economics too!:

The resultant cost is high. The CAP Green paper declared that if $100 billion is spent on Green activities that 935,200 jobs would be directly created, implying a cost of $107,000 per new job created. PERC notes such firms will be “unable to compete in the marketplace without permanent subsidies due to the costs inherent in such inefficiencies.”

Government mandates can’t take the place of free markets. Resource conservation, which the “Green’s purport to support, has been a natural incentive for markets throughout our nation’s history. Companies using resources typically have encouraged resource conservation—such as the forest products industry, which plants millions of trees a year, replacing more than those harvested. There is scant evidence that command-and-control economics accomplish efficient conservation.

It's OK everyone. The liberals are in total control of our government!

The Spain Experiment: Obama's "Green Jobs" are a Path to Failure

Obama has styled his "green jobs" plan after a similar experiment in Spain. It is destined for failure as it costs more jobs than it creates. From NRO:

# Based upon the Spanish experience that President Oprompter expressly cited as a model, if he succeeded in his (oddly floating) promise to further intervene in the economy to create 3 million (or is it 5 million?) "green jobs," the U.S. should expect to directly kill by the same programs at least 6.6 million (or as many as 11 million) jobs elsewhere in the economy.
# That is because green jobs schemes in Spain killed 2.2 jobs per job created, or about 9 existing jobs — I'll call them "real" jobs — lost for every 4 that are created. The latter, the study shows, then become wards of the state, dependent on the continuation of the mandates and subsidies, subject to the ritual boom and bust of artifically concocted jobs (read: ethanol).
# This does not include jobs lost due to redirection of resources, but are only the jobs directly killed by the scheme.
# The study calculates that since 2000, Spain spent €571,138 to create each “green job,” including subsidies of more than €1 million per wind-industry job.
# Each “green” megawatt installed destroys 5.39 jobs on average elsewhere in the economy: 8.99 by photovoltaics, 4.32 by wind energy, 5.84 by mini-hydro.