I guess I'm in an environmental mood, as this post is something of a follow-up to yesterday's, in which I criticized the proponents of cap-and-trade systems for carbon emission control for mischaracterizing these schemes as market-based when they're really not. To clarify, I'm not against programs to combat global warming, and cap-and-trade has some real advantages, but I think its supporters blunt the argument for it when they use false advertising simply to lure in the market zealots.
Today, I'm going to change gears slightly and look at another claim of the green revolutionaries, that, far from being a GDP killer, changes in our environmental policy will usher in a brave new world of so-called green-collar jobs. Taking one candidate's plan as an example, Hillary Clinton's initiatives will "help transform our economy and create at least 5 million jobs from clean energy over ten years."
I'm not picking on Hillary here, I'm using her program to talk about this because it's the most elaborately worked out one I could find (Obama's is very similar, but not as detailed, and McCain seems to feature a lot of hand-waving). (The details of her plan are here.) I'm not going to go through it in detail, but I want to pick out the parts that have to do with job creation.
These claims are summarized by Eric Pooley in a TIME article as:
1) Incremental or replacement?
There is an underlying assumption that these new green-collar jobs will simply appear with the right combination of tax breaks and innovation. Pleasant as that might be to believe, it is not clear that would happen.
Let's say that liquid hydrogen becomes the winner in the "How do we fuel our cars?" sweepstakes. Hey, we'll need thousands of drivers to get the liquid hydrogen from the plant to the new hydro stations, that'll be plenty of jobs.
Yes, it will, but what will happen to the existing gas truck drivers? Oh, right, they'll become the hydro truck drivers. It's difficult to see exactly how this switch will generate more jobs (unless hydrogen is less dense than gasoline, requiring more trucks, but also requiring more fill-ups - not a total win).
Right down the line, in every job category that has been mentioned, I have seen no appraisal of how the switch to green technology will create more jobs than old non-green technology. I accept the obvious truth that the environmental industry will grow; I'm not sure how that generates more jobs than we have today.
(One possible counter-argument: by sending less money to overseas petro-nations, we'll be keeping more of our money in the U.S., allowing us all to become rich. That's possible, but mitigated by my second point.)
2) American jobs?
We're going to add jobs by building "wind turbines, pollution scrubbers and more." Presumably this will happen in the same way that we've added jobs by producing consumer electronic goods in the U.S....
Wait, we moved those jobs overseas a while back. Just because it's a green revolution doesn't make the pressure to offshore new jobs any less. If it makes financial sense to let Korea or China make our plasma televisions, it almost certainly makes just as much sense to let those same countries make our turbines and scrubbers. We run into the same issues with environmental manufacturing as we have with any other manufacturing, and any plausible plan needs to address that.
There's another aspect to this - what if the breakthrough in the green revolution doesn't come in the U.S.? We're going to ramp up our educational systems to produce the environmental engineers of the future, but, presumably, we're going to continue to educate the world's children in that area (as in all others). Therefore, there's no guarantee that our efforts to upgrade the workforce will actually upgrade the American workforce. We don't have intellectual property laws covering what someone learns in our colleges, where an Indian MIT grad who finds the next advance is forced to work for an American company until we've wrung every piece of innovation out of him or her.
I'm not advocating restriction of providing educational opportunities to the rest of the world, but we need to think about what will happen if the next big energy discovery comes out of China or Kazakhstan or Norway. We may not be dependent on the Middle East sheiks any longer, but seeing solar-dollars or hydro-dollars flow out of the country instead of petro-dollars hardly seems a slam-dunk improvement.
Today, I'm going to change gears slightly and look at another claim of the green revolutionaries, that, far from being a GDP killer, changes in our environmental policy will usher in a brave new world of so-called green-collar jobs. Taking one candidate's plan as an example, Hillary Clinton's initiatives will "help transform our economy and create at least 5 million jobs from clean energy over ten years."
I'm not picking on Hillary here, I'm using her program to talk about this because it's the most elaborately worked out one I could find (Obama's is very similar, but not as detailed, and McCain seems to feature a lot of hand-waving). (The details of her plan are here.) I'm not going to go through it in detail, but I want to pick out the parts that have to do with job creation.
These claims are summarized by Eric Pooley in a TIME article as:
The green jobs that cap and trade could help create would be a big employment sector—including production of wind turbines, pollution scrubbers and more.Hillary's plans also talk about another category of jobs, those in construction and installation of these new green products, and swings by engineering and consulting without specific quantification. Unfortunately, these rosy predictions aside, there are two major criticisms that can be made.
1) Incremental or replacement?
There is an underlying assumption that these new green-collar jobs will simply appear with the right combination of tax breaks and innovation. Pleasant as that might be to believe, it is not clear that would happen.
Let's say that liquid hydrogen becomes the winner in the "How do we fuel our cars?" sweepstakes. Hey, we'll need thousands of drivers to get the liquid hydrogen from the plant to the new hydro stations, that'll be plenty of jobs.
Yes, it will, but what will happen to the existing gas truck drivers? Oh, right, they'll become the hydro truck drivers. It's difficult to see exactly how this switch will generate more jobs (unless hydrogen is less dense than gasoline, requiring more trucks, but also requiring more fill-ups - not a total win).
Right down the line, in every job category that has been mentioned, I have seen no appraisal of how the switch to green technology will create more jobs than old non-green technology. I accept the obvious truth that the environmental industry will grow; I'm not sure how that generates more jobs than we have today.
(One possible counter-argument: by sending less money to overseas petro-nations, we'll be keeping more of our money in the U.S., allowing us all to become rich. That's possible, but mitigated by my second point.)
2) American jobs?
We're going to add jobs by building "wind turbines, pollution scrubbers and more." Presumably this will happen in the same way that we've added jobs by producing consumer electronic goods in the U.S....
Wait, we moved those jobs overseas a while back. Just because it's a green revolution doesn't make the pressure to offshore new jobs any less. If it makes financial sense to let Korea or China make our plasma televisions, it almost certainly makes just as much sense to let those same countries make our turbines and scrubbers. We run into the same issues with environmental manufacturing as we have with any other manufacturing, and any plausible plan needs to address that.
There's another aspect to this - what if the breakthrough in the green revolution doesn't come in the U.S.? We're going to ramp up our educational systems to produce the environmental engineers of the future, but, presumably, we're going to continue to educate the world's children in that area (as in all others). Therefore, there's no guarantee that our efforts to upgrade the workforce will actually upgrade the American workforce. We don't have intellectual property laws covering what someone learns in our colleges, where an Indian MIT grad who finds the next advance is forced to work for an American company until we've wrung every piece of innovation out of him or her.
I'm not advocating restriction of providing educational opportunities to the rest of the world, but we need to think about what will happen if the next big energy discovery comes out of China or Kazakhstan or Norway. We may not be dependent on the Middle East sheiks any longer, but seeing solar-dollars or hydro-dollars flow out of the country instead of petro-dollars hardly seems a slam-dunk improvement.
2 comments:
After 10 years in the golden state, I shudder every time someone said that electric cars are the solution to the pollution problem. They forget that an electric car simply moves the tail pipe from the car to a coal generation plant in Utah.
Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely in favor of cleaning up the environment. And I put my money where my mouth is when I purchased a hybrid last fall. But I also don't think it helps either side to exaggerate the facts.
No, it doesn't, but sadly, exaggeration is all we have, at least concretely. Otherwise, we have a patchwork of "solutions," none of which is superior to what we have (from the standpoint of convenience or power/weight ratio or other metrics). Whether we can knit those into an answer that fills all the requirements is questionable. We may well have waited too long, there may be no magic bullet (where the energy fairy sneaks into our garages and retrofits our SUVs with a nuclear engine while we sleep).
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