Germany and the green jobs hoax - more jobs killed than made

It never ceases to amaze me that otherwise intelligent people's brains seemingly turn to mush when it comes to the environment, to be replaced by naive and credulous belief that simply refuses to take a hard look at the numbers. Here we have yet further proof that the numbers relating to green energy and jobs are fake and just do not add up. This report highlights a similar problem that was found in a study produced at Spain's King Juan Carlos University, ie that claims about our green employment future miss one very important, if inconvenient fact - because renewable energy is so hopelessly inefficient it is more expensive than conventionally generated energy, (a fact often hidden by government subsidies of one kind or another), and this inefficiency flows through the economy and destroys more jobs than it creates. As John from Powerline puts it, "no government can create wealth by subsidizing the inefficient production of energy." Simple commonsense you'd have thought, but not for our brainiac policy makers. And yet that is the fantasy behind all the claims, based upon dodgy accounting underpinned by even more dodgy assumptions, about the so-called green economy. While employment projections in the renewable sector convey seemingly impressive prospects for gross job growth, they typically obscure the broader implications for economic welfare by omitting any accounting of off-setting impacts. These impacts include, but are not limited to, job losses from crowding out of cheaper forms of conventional energy generation, indirect impacts on upstream industries, additional job losses from the drain on economic activity precipitated by higher electricity prices, private consumers' overall loss of purchasing power due to higher electricity prices, and diverting funds from other, possibly more beneficial investment. In Germany the government subsidy required to produce just one green job can be as high as €175,000, or $US240,000. Far more than the average income there. And the jobs are essentially fake. If the taxpayers' subsidy was withdrawn, they'd disappear. But apparently this is thought to make sense in green economics.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous