Here’s a shocker…. Senate Democrats are continuing down the path of job killing and costly energy reforms based on the tried and failed European cap-and-trade system.
Just this week Carlo Stagnaro and Luciano Lavecchia lamented about the cost of “green” jobs on the Italian workforce in a piece for Wall Street Journal Europe:
“The ‘green economy’ is supposed to be a win-win situation, as massive subsidies for renewable energy sources and other ‘clean’ technologies would help both the environment and the economic recovery. The facts on the ground tell a different story, though. 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.”
The American economy can’t handle more job losses, and as more people step into the unemployment line, we definitely can’t handle the “necessary increase” in energy costs that President Obama promised a coal worker on the campaign trail. These kinds of trendy initiatives show the short-sightedness of this administration and congressional leadership. The carbon trade plan enacted in Europe has proven disastrous for its economy, and there’s no reason to believe that if enacted here in the United States, we wouldn’t see similar results.
Cap-and-trade is touted as “environmentally friendly” and as a “green job creator”, but by any other name it’s simply another tax on energy, a tax on American families and a tax on job-creating businesses. We already have enough of those. We need to support an “all of the above” energy solution to explore every possible answer to our Nation’s energy crisis.
Moe Lane
Steve Maley
KnightsofMalta
Dan Spencer
Dan McLaughlin
Thank you for posting this Rep. Bachmann
Brian Hibbert (Diary) Thursday, May 13th at 4:05PM EST (link)And thank you for your efforts to keep this country free.
Like most progressive policies, they have good intentions, but their plans are not well thought out. They never seem to care about the consequences and side effects of their policies, only that they “mean well”.
Free markets always work better than government directed programs, not matter how well intentioned.
Candidate for Trustee of Illinois Central College
Socialism doesn’t work. It looks nice on paper, but it’s been tried and it’s failed miserably every time (usually accompanied by widespread death and suffering).
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"Tried and failed" -- I love it. Describes virtually everything the Debtocrats propose
ColdWarrior (Diary) Thursday, May 13th at 8:06PM EST (link)Cap and Tax: tried and failed in Europe.
Socialized Medicine: tried and failed in Canada, England and everywhere else.
Obamacare: tried and failed already according to the CBO numbers.
Corporate bailouts. tried and failed.
Government subsidized services and industries: tried and failed every time. Post Office. Amtrak. Fannie. Freddie. All tried and failed.
Socialism: tried and failed every time.
I think we need to preface every reference to every Debtocrat legislative proposal as “tried and failed.”
Rep. Bachmann, keep up the good fight. And please encourage the conservatives you speak to to get into the real ball game of politics by becoming precinct committeemen INSIDE the Republican Party to fill up the 50 per cent of the slots that are currently VACANT so we can elect better, more conservative people like YOU to Party leadership positions and make sure good conservative Republicans like YOU win the Republican primary elections.
For Liberty,
ColdWarrior, PC (that’s “precinct committeeman,” not “political child!”)
Conservatives, UNITE! CHANGE the Republican Party and save the world by UNITING INSIDE the Party as precinct committeemen. NOW!
In 2012, will YOU become a “voting member” of the Republican Party in your precinct?
Where it all started. Twitter @kaltkrieger
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Learn how to GOTV at The Concord Project and at Procinct and
This is governance by ideology
E Pluribus Unum (Diary) Friday, May 14th at 12:18PM EST (link)Facts don’t matter to these people. Including the above facts.
Rep Bachman, you’re doing good work here. Educate Americans. There’s no getting to the Democrats, and the way to get this stopped is for informed Americans to vote the Democrats out.
Kill the Terrorists
Protect the Borders
Punch the Hippies h/t IMAO
Thank You
pirate55 (Diary) Friday, May 14th at 12:36PM EST (link)….for your conservative voice. If you wouldn’t mind could you share this with those Republicans who voted for Cap and Trade!
Is NOW the time to attack "green jobs"?
Russ Rogers Saturday, May 15th at 7:49AM EST (link)It’s a good thing America gained 290,000 jobs in April. I don’t know how many of those jobs were “green jobs.” I wonder what the statistics are for America. How much more do “green jobs” in America cost compared to “dirty jobs”? But, if America creates green technology, we can sell it to places like Italy.
Is it a bold move (or exceedingly foolish) for Michele Bachmann to attack “green jobs” during a massive, uncontrolled oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? You might think that an ecological catastrophe of this magnitude would make it easier for Michele Bachmann to see the value of jobs that could lead to lower dependence on such environmentally unfriendly technologies like oil and coal.
How many fishermen are being put out of work in the Gulf? How much of the Gulf Coast’s fragile shorelines will be impacted? What are the real costs of these “dirty jobs”? The oil slick in Gulf is 2500 square miles right now! The news compares it to the size of states and it keeps getting bigger! The economic impact of this spill will be felt for years.
Plus, we’ve just had 11 oil workers die in an oil rig explosion and sinking, and 29 miners just died in a West Virginia coal mine. We just had the biggest American mining disaster in 30 years and the biggest oil spill ever! And Michele Bachmann choses NOW to say that “Green Jobs” cost too much? That’s cold! That seems like a complete disconnect with what is really in the news and on people’s minds right now.
Russ Rogers, did you bother to read the article first?
janis (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 8:27AM EST (link)Rep. Bachmann was referencing what the Italians were concluding about their own green jobs efforts and how detrimental they were. As to your weeping about how “environmentally unfriendly” oil and coal are, the benefits that coal and oil have provided the world for the past 150+ years have been incalculable. And, yes, disasters happen, and people die and things get messy. That’s what the rest of us call life.
Is it your contention that, apart from being hugely expensive and a jobs-killer, that so-called renewable resources will never have a downside for the environment? Wind farms kill birds, you know, and they are not capable of producing enough power to get the job done. Solar is nice, but did you know that the majority of the solar panels produced today are made in China under conditions that cause a considerable amount of pollution, not to mention being a hazard to the workers themselves.
Moral of the story, Russ Rogers: There is no free lunch. The liberal dream of everybody getting everything for free and clean energy for all at no cost whatsoever to the environment is just that, a dream. The unfortunate fact is that what constitutes their dream is a nightmare for the rest of us as they continue to kill the economy here while also doing their best to destroy our freedoms.
Of course not: he saw 'Michelle Bachmann'...
Moe Lane (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 8:48AM EST (link)…and his brain turned off.
The Kim Kardashian of blogging.
Check out my blog at http://moelane.com/.
http://moelane.com/filthy-lucre-filthy-lucre/
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My (combined) wish list.
You give him more credit than I do, Moe.
janis (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 8:54AM EST (link)I never assumed it was turned on in the first place. Perhaps he runs his brain on some form of green energy.
Nobody is against green jobs per se
mikerazar (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 11:17AM EST (link)But if they are really worthwhile then the private sector will rush in and create green billionaires. If they are not economically viable then the government will rush in and create some dirty green billionaires.
Tough choice, I know.
We have a nation to save, people.
Take heart Russ Rogers, the Massey Coal boys are going to jail
texasgalt (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 11:37AM EST (link)I mean this is a real opportunity for some payback to Tea Party supporters like Massey CEO Blakenship. It’s criminal, right?
With a little luck you greenies can shut the W Virginia coal mining down completely.
No doubt all those union coal miners can be retrained to install Chinese solar panels? Green jobs mean pink slips.
From Calzada at the University of Madrid:
The study calculated that, since 2000, Spain spent $774,000 to create each “green job”, including subsidies of more than $1.3 million per wind industry job. It found that creating those jobs resulted in the destruction of nearly 113,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs destroyed for every “green job” created. Jobs lost were mostly in the fields of metallurgy, non-metallic mining and food processing, beverage and tobacco.
Lot of wind energy in Spain . . . and 20% unemployment.
How green is this?
Just recently, dead in the middle of all those giant windmills, a new coal-fired generating plant will be constructed.
http://www.greeningofoil.com/post/Clean-coal-series-Texas-may-get-1st-commercial-plant.aspx
What to think about this?
SteveLA (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 11:59AM EST (link)texasgalt
So what was this guy’s complaint?
He didn’t like the aesthetics of these windmills, or was it noise, or what?
My next house will have a windmill, and solar panels and all the rest, not because I’m a greenie, I’m cheap and I hate the big electric bill that keeping cool in the summer out here brings.
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Competency over ideological purity and litmus tests
The conclusion says what happens when the tax subsidies run out. nt
redneck_hippie (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 12:16PM EST (link)Economics take over
SteveLA (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 12:27PM EST (link)redneck_hippie
Notice the shots of idle and abandoned oil pumps in the piece?
That’s what happens when economics takes over. Cost of oil below what it costs to pump oil fields, oil fields and pumping stopped or taken out of production.
Without subsidies to pay for the transmission lines, the building of new windmills will stop, the repair of transmission lines and repair of failed units, different question. If the cost of a KW of electricity goes down, below the costs to maintain these windmills, they get abandoned, in the absence of subsidies.
The trend for electric generation costs is going up, not down however, and due to mush heads who believe in Global warming, mandates for green produced energy are going up.
The real question is probably what happens in 30 years when this generation of windmill starts breaking, what is the economic picture look like.
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Competency over ideological purity and litmus tests
Those pump jacks in W Texas
texasgalt (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 1:27PM EST (link)weren’t abandoned and are idle only because the pumper knows he can get just as much oil by turning off the power for a certain amount of time. In some cases the pump jacks run every other day. Depends on what maximizes production vs the electricity needed to run the pump jack.
As an example, a well that runs every day and produces 3 bbls per day might in some cases produce 5-6 bbls running every other day . . . and save half on the electric bill and a lot on equipment wear and tear.
There was a time, many years ago, when you often didn’t need a pump jack. The oil would gush out or at least flow out.
For a long time it never went dark in much of the Permian, as the gas flares burned 24/7. There was no way to market the gas and so they just burned it off.
That dropped the pressure in the field and with all the production many of the wells are now the stripper type. A little MORE government all those years ago would have been a good thing. And I don’t say that often.
Economics at work
SteveLA (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 1:33PM EST (link)texasgalt
Same forces will effect Windmills one day, maybe.
Things will break, power lines will need repairs, cost of electricity will fluctuate, etc. etc.. Windmills will ether be kept in service or taken out given all the same sort of factors that effect pump jacks and old oil fields.
But about that view thing, I didn’t know that people in West Texas also had houses out on Maratha’s Vineyard where there’s a lot of NIMBY feelings about windmills.
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Competency over ideological purity and litmus tests
And one the first things to go will be these subsidized marketing images
6eorge Jetson (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 7:01PM EST (link)of all white, single pole windmills will underground transmission lines.
Somewhere there has to be a dead lizard hidden in that picture. nt
redneck_hippie (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 7:24PM EST (link)Economics? Or the battle between opposing lobbyists? nt
redneck_hippie (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 2:36PM EST (link)Probably better to spend your money on
Achance (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 12:33PM EST (link)good framing technology, insulation, low “e” glazing, and air-to-air heat exchangers for ventilation and if there’s a source a ground water heat pump. Solar is useful and practical in the right climate/latitude for domestic hot water and pool heating and that’s about it. Even in good solar regimes and with appropriately built houses, you have to have an electric/fossil HVAC system sized to the design loads, so what you’re doing is spending a lot of money on a low energy use house, a LOT of money on the solar/wind, and the same amount you would otherwise on the electric/fossil plant. It takes many, many years, if ever, to get your money back.
The deal with both conservation schemes and with alternative energy sources is brutally simple: a little saves a lot, a lot saves a little more and costs a LOT more. There are houses in interior Alaska where winter design temperatures are in the 70 below zero range that can be kept comfortable with little more than a family’s body heat and which require cooking heat to be directly vented or the house will overheat, but, it takes a whole bunch of adapting to actually live in one of them. Likewise, the technology is out there for very low energy houses in hot climates, but they, likewise, require some real lifestyle changes. Best and cheapest thing you can do in a hot climate is put on a light colored roof and make sure you have adequate attic ventilation. It is bad enough to have the cooling load from the walls and windows being exposed to outside air temps in the 90s, but then when you add the load from the whole ceiling structure being exposed to as much as 150 degrees in many attics, the A/C bill skyrockets.
I love to listen to my old friends in Georgia complaining about their summer power bills. If they’ve made any money, they simply must build themselves a dark red brick Georgian with big, big windows and a black fake slate roof and so everybody can see it, they put it out in the middle of an old cotton field with no shade. That thing is nothing but a solar collector and they have to pay Georgia Power to pull all the heat it generated out of it.
In Vino Veritas
Steve, the windmills are butt ugly
texasgalt (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 12:35PM EST (link)and not efficient. Take a trip out there, you will see 1/2 of them are locked down and many are just there, without any way to distribute the power they could generate. One small nuclear plant could eliminate the 200 sq mile footprint of W Texas windmills.
But if T Boone and friends want to drop 8 billion bucks on the hard scrabble of West Texas, most of the good old boys will say, where do I sign? After all, it take 20 acres to run a cow on the mesquite and prickly pear big country.
You will pay huge for the technology up front or you pay the electric company by the month. If the wind doesn’t blow, you still need a back-up. Still, there is something to be said for self-sufficency but the neighbors may complain about the view.
See them all the time
SteveLA (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 12:41PM EST (link)texasgalt
In So Cal there are two major areas of windmills, the Tehachapi Mountains and down near Palm Springs. I see windmills every day when I go to work and they are good looking to me.
Far as half of the windmills down, yep that’s the fast buck guys coming in making a fast buck and leaving town. Happened out here in CA in the 70′s, but the fast buck was the tax credits which were being harvested. Many of those schemes cost investors lots of money, and once the dust settle lots of rubbish. After a few years, once the fast money was made, the real developers who were in it for the long haul started showing up and now the Wind Industry is pretty solid, at least out here in CA.
At the end of the day, subsides and tax credits distort a market, but eventually market forces prevail and a business like Wind produced electric settles out to a pretty good business.
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Competency over ideological purity and litmus tests
Yes, the market will eventually determine- agreed /nt
texasgalt (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 1:30PM EST (link)Well things are slightly different when Royalties are concerned
Richard Mullins (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 12:46PM EST (link)I know I should tell you this but my dad’s 2nd Cousin has Wind Tubines on his property in Nolan County(not in Sweetwater but close to Nolan). My got pictures of them the last time he went up there in 2006. We never want them to replace coal and other power sources. Not pretty but all that ugly, somewhere in the middle. Never going the power of the 2 New Nuclear reactors that are proposed at South Texas Project(yeah, 1.35 GW of power each along with those that are there).
Richard Phillip Mullins BlogThe Squash Satire SiteNews on Happy Jet Airlines
Rmullins Pics
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Joe Biden is like a Decrepit Park owner with a Meth lab that happens to not only be a dealer but a user.
Let’s Bankrupt the Democratic paty. Make spend all the money to defend thier candidates.
Heck yes, take their money
texasgalt (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 1:49PM EST (link)I suspect in time, a good super-cell will erase most of them from Nolan county. The steers, rattlers and the jack rabbits will be happy to be rid of the constant whine of the turbines. A little tweak over at the Fort Phantom Hill generator could make up for the tiny power loss of the wind turbines.
That's interesting
SteveLA (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 1:58PM EST (link)texasgalt
I do wonder what happens to one of these big old windmills when a F3 or better Texas Twister comes through. You ever see that happen and get a news report, I’d very much like to see you post that information.
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Competency over ideological purity and litmus tests
Only took you the one day to show that you're a mind-numbed lefty.
Achance (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 11:48AM EST (link)Nothing like that good government school eduction in racism, recycling, and reproduction to make you totally ignorant of politics and economics. Go look at JobsUSA and the other sites that aggregate federal jobs. Go look at all the Lefty internet sites and see all the ads for temporary federal jobs. The Democrats voted themselves and their constituencies a trillion bucks more or less, most of which they’ve been sitting on so that they can gin up a bunch of phony temporary federal jobs for the ’10 election season and make fools like you think that happy days are here again so they don’t get thrown out on their communist a#$es in November.
In Vino Veritas
Art, this hit and run troll couldn't be bothered with facts
Richard Mullins (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 11:58AM EST (link)It’s all about the “Green Jobs”(not green in the pocketbook though) that bought and paid for by people like you and me. Since we live in age that hasn’t perfected the use of Hydrogen, we have to use Oil,Coal,Gas and Nuclear in order to get power(unless you want us to be Venezuela with Power shortages from a Hydro Dam). Stupid idiots have tried to kill off more jobs than they can create(2:1 ratio is to kind, it’s more like 5:1).
Richard Phillip Mullins BlogThe Squash Satire SiteNews on Happy Jet Airlines
Rmullins Pics
Rpmullins Twitter
Joe Biden is like a Decrepit Park owner with a Meth lab that happens to not only be a dealer but a user.
Let’s Bankrupt the Democratic paty. Make spend all the money to defend thier candidates.
There's this continent called Europe that is to the political left of the US
6eorge Jetson (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 1:40PM EST (link)In case you’ve been under a rock for the past week, let me relay that things aren’t going too well over there.
Unfortunatly George
kyle8 (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 2:28PM EST (link)It is only SLIGHTLY to the left of us now in days.
“Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty”
Kyle
"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else."
6eorge Jetson (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 6:21PM EST (link)-Winston Churchill
There are those that can foresee peril and avoid it intuitively. Not America.
There are those that observe others succumb to peril and only then avoid it.
There are those that learn only from the school of hard knocks. Churchill thought of America this way.
And there are those that never learn.
We have a vivid scoreboard in Europe that is telling us that years of the nanny state are failing spectacularly in 2010. We in America under the Obama administration and the 111th Congress have boarded the fast train to the destination that Greece has reached and others are closing in.
Are we Americans smart enough to get off?
From a Floridian
pirate55 (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 11:35AM EST (link)Well Mr. Rogers, how is your neighborhood? I live in Florida and am also concerned with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But one event does not signal the need for “cap and trade” or severely limiting our “oil exploration efforts” because we continue to be at the mercy of foreign oil. As a country we need to persevere.
Yes, we need to stress safety with oil and coal and maybe quality oversight will limit tragedies in the future. Lastly, do yourself a favor Mr. Rogers and delve more deeply into how many of those 290,000 jobs were created in the “private sector”. The answer may surprise you.
188,000 of those 290 were birth/death BLS black box fantasy jobs
Common_Cents (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 1:32PM EST (link)“For those unfamiliar with the birth/death model, monthly jobs adjustments are made by the BLS based on economic assumptions about the birth and death of businesses (not individuals).
Birth/Death assumptions are supposedly made according to estimates of where the BLS thinks we are in the economic cycle. Theory is one thing practice is clearly another.”
In other words, your government makes them up.
Obama=Golfer in Chief, Leading from,
behind, the Back Nine.Leaders don’t create movements. Movements create leaders. Get involved. Your future depends on it.
Govt “invests” YOUR tax money for POLITICAL return rather than economic return.
To be reliable, wind power needs a constant source of preferably hot air
6eorge Jetson (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 1:35PM EST (link)…and I think I know just where to get it !!
Thank you for your conservative advocacy, Rep. Bachmann
Rep. Bachmann
kyle8 (Diary) Saturday, May 15th at 2:25PM EST (link)Thank you so much for all you do.
Just want you to know that if you throw your hat into the presidential ring I will be a big supporter.
“Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty”
Kyle
found someone who posted more of the article
kylegh (Diary) Sunday, May 16th at 3:01PM EST (link)“According to the existing literature, though, the net occupational effect of green subsidies may be positive insofar a country is a technology-producer and –exporter. Italy is neither, which leaves room for a presumption of a negative net impact on employment. Moreover, some studies—most notably Calzada et al. (2009)—find that the net occupational effect may be negative in Spain, which is a technology-producer and –exporter.”
So, the question when trying to get a correlation between Italy, Spain, and America, is, what are the differences. Are we exactly the same as Spain? Are we exactly the same as Italy? Are we a technology producer or consumer? exporter or importer? If we are an importer, and we don’t produce technology, than we would have a negative effect and it would cost more to produce green jobs. But, stay with me here, what would the effect be if at the same time you were subsidizing the green job creation, you were subsidizing the green technology creation. I imagine that producing the technology in the same country would have a beneficial effect, where before it didn’t.
Now, why would it not have had a beneficial effect in the first place? Were people trained to do these jobs? Were there lots of these jobs to be had or would it make sense for them to look elsewhere for easier jobs to get. A few more questions. Do we want these jobs at all? Are we content to keep the types of jobs we have now and only have those jobs we have now? Are we trying to expand the types and amounts of jobs we have? Are these jobs going to be created eventually and by subsidizing them now we speed up the process and make sure that foreign trained labor isn’t imported for them? What types of other jobs could be created with the same money? What is the cost of coal workers vs solar panel installers? Also, how much energy are both creating in their working career?
Actually, never mind about these questions. We are only talking about dollars here, nothing else matters. So, ceteris paribus, green jobs cost more than other jobs to create. agreed.