(Repost. -LLJ)
Bloomberg – Job Losses From Obama Green Stimulus Foreseen in Spanish Study:
Subsidizing renewable energy in the U.S. may destroy two jobs for every one created if Spain’s experience with windmills and solar farms is any guide.
For every new position that depends on energy price supports, at least 2.2 jobs in other industries will disappear, according to a study from King Juan Carlos University in Madrid.
U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2010 budget proposal contains about $20 billion in tax incentives for clean-energy programs. In Spain, where wind turbines provided 11 percent of power demand last year, generators earn rates as much as 11 times more for renewable energy compared with burning fossil fuels.
The premiums paid for solar, biomass, wave and wind power – - which are charged to consumers in their bills — translated into a $774,000 cost for each Spanish “green job” created since 2000, said Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor at the university and author of the report.
“The loss of jobs could be greater if you account for the amount of lost industry that moves out of the country due to higher energy prices,” he said in an interview.
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Mountaintop removal mining destroys more jobs than it creates.
That flaw occurs in all sorts of ventures and proposals, not just “green” ones, and just because Spaniards fucked something up doesn’t mean Americans will too. We got cap-and-trade right when it came to acid rain.
Sometimes it seems to me the heart of modern Republican ideology is a total lack of faith in our country. Instead of learning from mistakes, Republicans become terrified of repeating them. Instead of fixing flaws, they trash everything.
The problem with green energy is that if solar for instance isn’t cost competitive with nuclear or fossil no amount of tax policy or Yankee ingenuity will fix that. If solar is, e.g., 2x the per watt cost of fossil then any attempt to boost solar is doomed before the game begins.
In a whole economy, one without externalized costs, renewable and non-polluting energy would have the competitive advantage. In an economy that allows, for example, National Coal to inflict thousands of years of runoff problems on a community’s streams free of charge, destructive and dirty has the competitive advantage.
Fixing those externalities and inefficiencies can be done, and the transition can be orderly and gradual. Economists and engineers can figure this stuff out, and in many cases already have.
The problem is that both political parties and corporate media have strong ties to polluting industries, so they distort perceptions and make rational discussion a major challenge. Republicans offer nothing but noise. Democrats counter with watered-down, porked-up perversions of solutions, which then have to be further porked up and compromised.
We could solve our energy and pollution problems with American ingenuity if we had the will and wisdom to see beyond the short-term interests of the status quo.
Well, if it’s just a political problem, why hasn’t another country already gone solar?
Japan, China, South Korea, France, Germany – those countries all have great wealth and engineering resources. If solar is the solution and only politics stands in its way why haven’t those countries already gone that route?
Les Jones´s last blog post..The Jeanette B. builds a boat dock
Who said solar was the solution? Internalizing the costs of pollution and extraction is the solution. Once we have fair pricing for energy, the market can find the right mix of energy sources.