Green Jobs Hurt the Economy

“When a government builds a road, it subsidizes the car industry.”
– Comment seen on a Blog

Wind turbines at night Credit: lukewestall

A peer, who is also a Rush Limbaugh listener, was explaining to me the folly of things Obama said in his ASU Commencement Speech, where the President emphasized charitable volunteer work, shrugging off the facade of materialism, and green-collar jobs as where students should seek to make a lasting mark on the world. Limbaugh apparently derided Obama for wanting a green-energy modeled exactly like Spain’s, which is a horrible failure that will bring doom doom doom upon America if we don’t cut taxes for the rich–or some such nonsense.

Obama didn’t mention Spain or Europe in the Commencement speech (Doughboy can never seem to keep his facts straight, but his fans are a very forgiving lot.. but only to Doughboy.), but he did make the following talking point while on the campaign trail:

Think of what’s happening in countries like Spain, Germany and Japan where they’re making real investments in renewable energy. They’re surging ahead of us, poised to take the lead in these new industries. This isn’t because they’re smarter than us, or work harder than us, or are more innovative than we are. It’s because their governments have harnessed their people’s hard work and ingenuity with bold investments—investments that are paying off in good, high-wage jobs.

A Wall Street Journal opinion piece counters this argument with a study that indicates, “Spain has lost 2.2 jobs for each job created by solar, wind or hydroelectric power producers.” A myriad of other articles cite the same estimate¹, but I prefer the Economist’s ever-fair and accurate explanation of what this estimate means:

Spain’s private sector, on the other hand, creates a job for every €260,000 or so invested, by Mr Calzada’s reckoning. So if the government had left the €29 billion in the hands of the private sector, it would have created 113,000 jobs with it—2.2 times as many. In other words, the government, Mr Calzada finds, is destroying 2.2 ordinary jobs for every green one it creates.

The study has numerous critics, and was written by an organization whose purpose is combating fears of global warming, which they do with generous donations from ExxonMobile, but let’s analyze this point, specifically the idea that renewable energy costs more jobs than it creates.

I take particular issue with the idea that green jobs destroy ordinary jobs. This supposedly occurs because the government takes money from the private sector and invests it in a less efficient manner. If the private sector were able to keep the money, it would create 2.2 times the jobs as government. But this assumes that private industry has an incentive to create these jobs. The past decades have demonstrated no such proclivities. We gave industry a tax cut, and they pocketed it, generating record profits for ExxonMobile, but creating no jobs.

Secondly, articles citing the study conveniently ignore Germany and Japan’s renewable energy initiatives. Germany and Japan are now global leaders in photovoltaic technology. Germany has taken this course of action to cushion the country against soaring energy prices, as it experienced in the 1970s. Germany now holds half the world’s solar energy output, putting the country in the lead in a technology the world will have to move towards sooner or later, which is why California and Japan have their own initiatives following Germany’s model.

Finally, there is the argument being floated by dittoheads that renewable energy requires fewer jobs in and of itself. Coal power plants employ far more workers because, in addition to personnel running the plant, there are all the miners, truck drivers, and supporting personnel who are employed in removing coal from the ground to power the plants. In comparison, wind and solar energy only require the personnel to run the plant, the sources of energy deliver themselves naturally. We are therefore going to suffer huge job losses by switching to sustainable energy sources.

I only have to look at my own job to understand why this argument is spurious. I’m a computer programmer. Before the automated computer, there were hundreds of personnel employed with the title of Computer, people who performed computations all day. Then the electronic computer came along, putting these hundreds and thousands of people out of work. Who replaced them? Me. As a single computer programmer, I have put dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people out of jobs by automating the work they do.

But you know what? I’ve also created jobs. The computer industry has created hundreds of thousands of jobs by opening the realms of possibility and freeing people from mundane tasks. Renewable energy puts people out of work the exact same way, and, like information technology, will free people from mundane tasks, which will ultimately open more opportunities than it makes obsolete, which will ultimately generate far more jobs than will be created by sticking with antiquated strategies for powering our civilization.

¹ The WSJ article also makes the bizarre argument that green jobs aren’t sustainable because, once you’ve built the power plant, the construction workers are out of a job (the same argument is made here and elsewhere)