The green jobs delusion

George Will:

THE Spanish professor is puzzled. Why, Gabriel Calzada wonders, is the US president recommending that America emulate the Spanish model for creating "green jobs" in "alternative energy" even though Spain's unemployment rate is 18.1 percent (more than double the European Union average) partly because of spending on such jobs?

Calzada, 36, an economics professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, has produced a report that, if true, is inconvenient for the administration's green agenda, and for some budget assumptions that are dependent upon it. He says Spain's torrential spending on wind farms and other forms of alternative energy has indeed created jobs. But his report concludes that they're often temporary and have received $752,000 to $800,000 each in subsidies; wind-industry jobs cost even more: $1.4 million each.

And each new job entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs that are lost or not created in other industries.The creation of alternative-energy jobs has subtracted about 110,000 jobs from elsewhere in Spain's economy.

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What matters most, however, isn't that reports such as Calzada's are right in every particular. It is hardly counterintuitive that politically driven investments are economically counterproductive. Environmentalists with the courage of their convictions should argue that the point of such investments is to subordinate market rationality to the higher agenda of planetary salvation.

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The Obama energy plan is all about manipulating the market for energy in hopes that the so called green energy ideas are competitive. But even with huge subsidies they are still not competitive and that is why they are money losers. Just this week a virtually new biodiesel plant in Houston was put on the market because it was not making money.

Meanwhile Obama continues to make bogus claims about his energy plan "benefiting" Texas. He can't know that. This is a faith based statement. Hardly anyone has read the anti energy bill the Democrats are pushing through Congress and I am sure he has not.