Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
from James Pethokoukis:
Create jobs, don’t go green
As usual, Joel Kotkin nicely encapsulates the problem at hand:
Now the question is whether the president can refocus on jobs. This will take, among other things, backing off the economically ruinous climate change agenda. Even the most gullible economic development officials are beginning to realize that "green jobs" are no panacea. In fact, as evident in Spain, Germany and even Denmark, over-tough green legislation can destroy the productive capacity of the most enlightened industries. Similarly in green strongholds like California and Oregon, the mounting climate change jihad could slow and even explode the incipient recovery by imposing ever more draconian regulation on businesses that can choose to migrate to less onerous locales.
There are some hopeful signs of Obama's repositioning. His recent moves embracing nuclear power and off-shore oil drilling, however inadequate, show that he's at least trying to triangulate between the green purists and the unreconstructed despoilers. Some sort of moderated energy legislation--there's no way to get the more radical House version through the Senate--would reassure businesses and the public that the president has jobs as his No. 1 priority.
Are U.S. solar jobs here to stay? Senators fight for a yes.
A trio of U.S. senators this week introduced a bill to spur solar manufacturing jobs in the United States.
Through additional tax credits, the legislation aims to encourage more U.S. companies to make solar equipment, creating jobs and building up the country’s clean energy economy.
Many — from politicians and environmentalists to investors – have pinned great hopes on green jobs. Clean energy could create 850,000 manufacturing jobs in the United States, according to recent research Reuters reported this week.
The latest proposal could create 315,000 U.S. jobs along, according to Solar Energy Industries Association, which is pushing for the bill.
But would the extra tax incentives be enough to keep solar power companies producing in the United States?
A decade ago, the United States produced more than 40 percent of the world’s solar photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight into electricity. In 2008, the United States made only 5 percent of the world’s solar cells, according to the solar group.
Those numbers seem bleak. But the solar jobs landscape is not so black and white.
It might have been interesting to include the names of the three Senators.
Just sayin’
Vegas likes cleantech stakes
The subtitle of Senate leader Harry Reid’s Monday clean energy conference was ‘jobs’ and the unofficial subtitle was: ouch!
Nevada exists on mining and gambling, and neither is doing too great at the moment. So Vegas is chasing the money to green projects, envisioning solar photovoltaic and solar thermal plants popping up all over its desert to supply California and anyone else that wants clean power.
The alternative — no work. Union building trades unemployment is 50 percent and rising in Reno, the northwestern part of the state near the California border, and in the high 20s in the area around Vegas, where the big projects are counted on three fingers, AFL-CIO state Executive Secretary-Treasurer Danny Thompson said.
”There is not jobs scheduled until late 2010, and by then all of us could be homeless,” said unemployed Vegas plumber and pipe fitter Becky Swartzbaugh, whose apprentice is living with her.
The idea of a green Las Vegas could be amusing on the face of it — a monster energy-using city that gobbles water and is considering building a multi-billion-dollar pipeline to an acquifier up north going green?
But there are some green shoots – the mammoth CityCenter proejct by MGM Mirage is full of LEED qualifications, the city is trying to cut per capita water use by a third, and water cops are chasing down sprinkler users spilling water into the gutters. It’s a start.
In any case, building solar arrays will create work. Solar Millennium expects to create 1,600 building jobs and 180 permanent jobs for a 500 Mwatt solar thermal plant.
Not only in the City of Las Vegas, I think urban area water wastage has to be tackled at grass root level. And investing on Solar Energy Generation in Nevada will be a definite viable venture one can think of ..We all have to remember that the Fossil Fuel Energy and Water are limited sources and we have to utilize it in a sustainable manner ..
Do green jobs cannibalize other jobs?
President Obama has promised to help create millions of new green jobs, saying that doing so will spur the U.S. economy toward recovery — and has held out Spain as having “surged ahead” of the rest of the world by investing in renewable energy.
But a new study of Spain’s renewable energy initiatives has found that creating green jobs actually destroys jobs in other sectors — and most of the time doesn’t lead to permanent employment.
The study, which was directed by an economics professor at Juan Carlos University of Madrid, found that every green job created by the Spanish government destroyed an average of 2.2 other jobs, and that only 1 in 10 were permanent.
“Spain’s experience cited by President Obama as a model reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about 9 jobs lost for every 4 created,” the professor, Gabriel Calzada, wrote in an introduction to the study.
“The study’s results demonstrate how such ‘green jobs’ policy clearly hinders Spain’s way out of the current economic crisis, even while U.S. politicians insist that rushing into such a scheme will ease their own emergence from the turmoil,” Calzada wrote.
Conservative bloggers have seized on the study to show that Obama’s green energy push will cost the U.S. some 6 million jobs — although others have injected a note of skepticism.
http://www.environmentalcrossing.com is a good source of jobs because it only shows you jobs from employer websites and every other job board out there. It is a good tool to track down jobs because these jobs are often not advertised.
California’s green jobs start young
California’s green jobs program is off to the races with $20 million in state and fed funds for a 20-month program for some 1,000 ‘at risk’ young adults. The California Green Corps will have a little of everything — green job training, a stipend, educational requirement and community service. Whether green industry, which is much more battered by the recession than many had hoped, will be able to hire when the government tap turns off is still a subject of debate. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger sure hopes so.
The state has high hopes for green — the folding kind — from green — the environmentally friendly kind. The state’s fact sheet linked above suggests 114,000 jobs and $25.3 billion in additional annual revenue from California green policies. Forecasting is tough, though, and estimates of what California’s global warming legislation will mean to the economy have been savaged. The state is pushing ahead with policies to combat global warming while acknowledging the economy might force changes.
Reuters pool photo
It saddens me that we’ve become “idiocracy.”
Someday, when California mandates EV’s and there’s no
electricity because we don’t have any power plants
and everyone is sitting in the dark, someone will
spout, “We have electric cars. They’re what we need.”
How are our so called best & brightest falling for all
of this? Think about what it takes to make batteries
and add that to your environmental costs. Then think
about what it takes to make new cars constantly.
Anybody that was dead serious about the environment would
want everyone to drive the modern equivalent of a 1984
Mercedes Diesel and drive it for 35 years. THAT is
environmental. Not a new Prius every 4 years.
Green jobs really on the way? New U.S. solar plants announced this week
Are those green jobs Obama has been promising already on their way? Really?
Despite a weak global economy and all the gloom that has brought to the solar industry of late, two solar companies this week quietly bucked the trend by announcing new manufacturing plants here in the United States.
On Monday, Hemlock Semiconductor said it would invest up to $3 billion to expand U.S. production of polysilicon, the key raw material used to make solar cells and semiconductors. That will include $1.2 billion to build a new facility in Clarksville, Tennesee, and up to $1 billion to expand its current operations in Hemlock, Michigan. The company said the investment will create 800 permanent positions at the plants (and a few hundred more once Clarksville is expanded) and 1,800 construction jobs.
A day later, Signet Solar said it will build a solar panel manufacturing plant in Belen, New Mexico. The first phase of the plant will create 200 jobs, though ultimately it will employ about 600 people, the Menlo Park, California-based company said.
These announcements stand in stark contrast to the slew of dour news that has emanated from the industry in recent weeks. Just yesterday, Hemlock rival MEMC became the latest solar player to cut its sales forecast for the current quarter.
Hemlock acknowledged the dismal state of the economy in its statement, saying “the exact scale of this investment will be determined by market conditions.”
It’s too soon, of course, to know how those “conditions” will play out, and things look pretty grim at the moment. But with Barack Obama’s inauguration around the corner, there is palpable optimism that more alternative energy companies will be setting up shop here.
Yes, I think this will create green jobs and this is a major part in my opinion to a real sustainable recovery in America. We need to build products that we need at home and can export to bring our trade imbalance down. Also building infrastructure is a great way to increase the productivity of our country and create higher wage jobs that will give these people more income to spend into the economy. It is not realistic to think that we can outsource most of our manufacturing and be a real world economic power. Consumption is not the end all. .02
I agree with Liberty Lover with one caveat. Private industry necessarily makes it’s decisions with some weight on long term considerations and most weight on what will sustain their enterprise in the short term.
Fossil Fuels are a finite energy source with geographical and political aspects that can be ignored only at our peril.
Like it or not, a country’s local, state, and federal governments collectively make many decisions every day. Those decisions should place more weight on long term factors than private enterprise is able to do.