Green jobs confusion

With the massive $787-billion stimulus bill including provisions to encourage the creation of "green jobs," Americans deserve an honest appraisal of how such green jobs will work. So far, they aren't getting it. In fact, a recent statement by Al Gore shows just how much Americans are being misled on this issue. Green jobs are a shell game, and we're falling for it. In the Financial Times, on February 17, Gore, in an op ed co-authored with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, asserts that, "In the US, there are now more jobs in the wind industry than in the entire coal industry." But as Roger Pielke Jr of the University of Colorado points out, there is something wrong there. In November 2008, the coal industry generated 155 million megawatt-hours of electricity, while wind generated only 1.3 million megawatt-hours. If wind really does employ more people than coal, it is doing so at a huge cost to American efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness. Of course, the wind industry does not employ more people. Gore and Ban were flat out wrong in their assertion, which should make one question any assertions in Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, or any U.N. document, for that matter. As the Christian Science Monitor found out, the figure comes from an apples-and-oranges comparison. Comparing apples to apples, the coal industry probably employs over 1.4 million people-and those workers are still over seven times as productive as the wind energy workers...Iain Murray in The DC Examiner

Read the rest of this column and learb that: many of these jobs are temporary, low wages are paid in the wind, solar and "green building" industries, U.S. wind and solar industries are already "off-shoring" the manufacture of components, and that a study in Spain found for "every green job created in Spain, 3.9 jobs have been lost as a result throughout the economy."

In other words, green jobs are a net loss to the economy.