Re: What About Jobs of Other Colors?

Katrina’s post on Friday that highlighted Energy Ventures Analysis’s job destruction realism about Pennsylvania’s proposed alternative energy mandates is buttressed by similar research elsewhere, including last year’s Spanish study conducted by Dr. Gabriel Calzada of King Juan Carlos University, which found that for every “green” job created due to government programs, 2.2 Spanish jobs were destroyed.

Now today in Wall Street Journal Europe, Carlo Stagnaro and Luciano Lavecchia of Italian think tank Istituto Bruno Leoni introduce a study they conducted in their country, and they determined the employment effect from “green” incentives was more than twice as destructive as Spain’s:

…One green job costs on average as much 4.8 jobs in the entire economy, or 6.9 jobs in the industrial sector. The same amount of subsidies that have already been given or committed could produce nearly five times as many jobs if allowed to be spent by the private sector elsewhere in the economy.

Our results are largely consistent with the evidence provided by Professor Gabriel Calzada of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, who found that in Spain, one green job costs on average as much as 2.2 “dirty” jobs. The reason why the Italian figure is more than twice as high is mostly because Italy, unlike Spain, is technology importer, not a producer.

Our figures only seem to confirm what is intuitive: That the green economy may be very profitable for those who receive the subsidies, but that they are detrimental to the overall economy.

Europe’s experience not good enough for you? Try the Beacon Hill Institute’s various peer reviews of state-level, unrealistically optimistic reports from the Center for Climate Strategies, which dwell in the same fantasyland as Black and Veatch’s study for Pennsylvania. And then there’s the American Council for Capital Formation’s various studies that show detrimental economic and jobs impacts of carbon capping initiatives at the state level (effectively the same as mandating alternative energy sources).

Can’t be bothered with all these competing studies? Then look hard at the obvious: Every alternative (“green”) energy resource cannot survive on its own economically without huge government subsidies or mandates. Even advocates for their use say so. The very fact that they need infusions of additional cash — by force either through taxpayers or through electricity ratepayers via regulation — by logic determines that you are paying a much higher price for an inefficient “green” job than you are for a market-desired, non-subsidized job of another color.

Has it occurred to anyone else that environmental extremists are also employment racists?