Someone Explain 'Green Jobs', Please.

So I heard Eleanor Clift bloviating about how “Green Jobs” were going to save the American economy. And of course, Obama appointed a “Green Jobs” czar, and will presumably appoint another now that this one crashed and burned.

I’ve heard enough about ‘Green Jobs’ from lefties that I guess they think this is some kind of big deal - a way forward in the future to have the U.S. leapfrog the world and create a new industry that will save it from job erosion and the ravages of international competition.

The problem, so far as I can tell, is that it’s complete nonsense. It seems to me to be little more than political creation - a way to tell the voters that voting ‘green’ won’t hurt them in the pocketbook. Why, we’ll regulate industry, rid the world of CO2, AND make a pile of money! Win-win!

Liberals apparently take this seriously enough for the President to be expending considerable effort on it. So I would like to know: How exactly do ‘Green Jobs’ save the U.S. economy? What is it about them that makes the U.S. any more protected from international competition than any other job? What does a ‘Green Job’ even look like? Am I to understand that the U.S. government is simply going to create a whole new high-tech industry through the sheer brilliance of the Obama administration - one that no other capitalists or investors have thought of?

I’d like some detail, please. Maybe an example of a ‘green job’? An explanation of how it is profitable?

Well, I mow lawns. I have a little dog on the back of my Deere whose head bobs as I mow. It’s way cool.

on a more serious note. Click search inside this book

Newer forms of energy are cheaper than coal. Wind power is now cheaper than coal at about $0.04 a KWH. It is also getting cheaper, with high altitude winds being $0.01-0.02 a KWH. A company called KiteGen is working on wind energy that costs less than $0.0001 a KWH, making energy production near free.

Same with solar power, or geothermal. It is getting cheaper than coal.

There is also energy savings from higher efficiency. As we learn ways to power buildings and electronics on less energy, that means more savings. I think the average US family spends something like $5000 a year on energy (heating, electricity and gasoline). However higher efficiency with higher MPG cars, alternatives, etc. might cut that number giving more money to devote to other parts of the economy.

Then there is domestic energy rather than foreign energy. Oil from foreign countries (Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, etc) leaves the economy and contributes to the trade deficit. Cars that are (hopefully) made in america and powered by American grid electricity or American hydrogen, natural gas or some other fuel will cut our trade deficit.

US companies that have energy that costs less per KWH, that need less of it (due to higher energy efficiency) will be at an advantage to other companies.

Plus lower consumer costs and a lower trade deficit (due to not importing as much oil) will help our economy.

The apollo alliance says a $300 billion investment over 10 years can grow the economy by $1.4 trillion and save $284 billion in lower energy.

http://www.jimharris.com/tag/apollo-alliance/

The energy savings alone could pay for the investment.

The theory is pretty simple. We have to get away from using fossil fuels for energy. Windmills have to be built. They have to be built and assembled here. Solar panels have to be built and sold here. All non oil and coal energy systems have to be researched and improved. That has to be done here.
In the Detroit River they are building energy systems that are powered by waves . They will have to be built and perfected here. The concept was created at Univ. of Michigan. Once it is worked out ,it can be sold and exported. There are a lot of suitable rivers in the world.
We have to research new ways of generating power. We have to do it here not export it away for short term profits and low wages.

Well, this one shouldn’t be too hard to understand. The subset of so-called “green jobs” that involves increasing our energy efficiency, reliance on renewable energy sources, and infrastructure sustainability is linked in pretty obvious ways with domestic and local employment. We’re talking about a wide variety of tasks like installing solar panels and solar hot water heaters in American homes, doing maintenance on American wind farm turbines, conducting energy efficiency audits on American office buildings, installing water-conserving irrigation systems on American farms, etc. etc. etc.

I’m sure you can readily see that workers performing such tasks need to be physically here in the US, so the fact that the cost of similar services would be lower in China or the Philippines is mostly irrelevant.

In order to believe that, I think you have to be pretty resolutely ignoring the fact that “green technology” and “sustainability” are currently seen as pretty hot investment areas worldwide. Venture capitalists are apparently still viewing green tech as “one bright spot” in a generally sluggish investment climate, and they seem to have little doubt that there are significant opportunities there.

Now, if what you’re actually trying to do here is express a more wide-ranging skepticism about whether “green economy” efforts are the most effective strategy for economic growth in the long term, you’ve got an interesting debate. But as for whether the “green economy” is a big deal in the here and now, that’s pretty much a no-brainer. For better and/or for worse, the world in general is paying a lot of attention to environmental sustainability issues at the present, and pretending that it’s all just a flash-in-the-pan US liberal political fad is, IMHO, silly and shortsighted.

I’m trying to figure out how this makes more sense than announcing an ‘internet jobs’ economy. After all, we all know theoretically how you can make money from the internet.

However, what goes unstated is that somehow there is a big need for such jobs going unfilled right now, and why the government feels that it can somehow create this industry and make it profitable, AND turn it into a uniquely American form of jobs.

This is just old-school industrial policy in 21st century garb. It sounds like Japan’s MITI and its constant attempt to manufacture new markets. Or closer to home, like the biofuels debacle, which wound up harming the environment and requiring constant government subsidy and/or bailouts to survive.

How about a specific? I’ve heard the generalities about how wind and solar are going o save the world, but tell me, in detail, what the government can do that the market hasn’t already considered, and how many jobs it will create, and how you’ll prevent those jobs from leaking away to other countries anyway like other manufacturing jobs have.

I’m not talking about an isolated company here or there, either. This is supposed to be part of a larger ‘green economy’, which is going to change our lives and the way we do business and make it all greener, I guess. How does government know what kind of economy we need? If the green economy is better, why aren’t we doing it without the government’s help?

I’m all for researching new forms of power. Research does not create many jobs. I’m assuming that somewhere in this plan is going to be money spent to actually start implementing this stuff, and not just researching it. I’m guessing the government will start funding the construction of solar panels and windmills and other alternative energy sources, either with direct investment in research, or in big tax credits to stimulate demand, or something like that. Is that correct?

I am surprised you are asking this question, since the answer is so evident and obvious. Transferring from oil to electric will eliminate us from reliability from the hostile middle east, where we are am fighting two useless wars, if we weren’t so dependant on their oil.

“Green jobs” means renewable energy, not something that will run out - please tell me that you do not think that fossil fuels are endless in their capacity.

There are plenty of new jobs being generated in the renewable energy market, if you choose to look for them.

Well, you did understand my explanation of why service-sector “green jobs” involving the commercial and residential infrastructure of America count as a “uniquely American form of jobs”, right? I mean, it should be pretty obvious that Chinese factory workers aren’t going to be physically installing solar panels on US roofs.

As for whether “green tech” in general can be made into a “uniquely American” form of jobs, I don’t see how it could in the long term, any more than high-end automotive engineering is uniquely German or high-end viniculture is uniquely French. AFAICT, the goal is not to somehow establish a permanent American monopoly on green technology, but to exploit our advantages in R&D sophistication in order to make us at least one of the leaders in the field in the near term.

Yup. Why is that so surprising to you? Where did you get the idea that governments have stopped formulating and implementing industrial policy? Did you somehow imagine that things like industrial policy and subsidies and so forth no longer have a massive economic and political presence in national and international contexts worldwide? Have you been hiding in a cave on Mars populated exclusively by ardent libertarians, or what?

Well, Wesley Clark has already pointed you to the Apollo Alliance, and here is a link to various reports on these issues created or cited by them. I doubt that they’ll answer all your questions or remove all your doubts, many of which IMO are reasonable, but at least they’ll provide you with the elementary understanding that you seem to be seeking about the basic arguments the “green job” advocates are making.

:dubious: There’s the good old market-fundamentalist dogma again: “If it were a good idea, the private sector would already have taken care of it.” Sure, I don’t disagree with you that eventually, if environmentally sustainable technology turns out to be the major industry of the 21st century, the private sector will be all over it and will need no encouragement beyond the lure of profit. The question here, ISTM, is whether in the near term the private sector will accomplish the transition in the most efficient and least harmful way possible with zero government policy involvement.

You believe on principle that it would, of course. But I’m concerned that your preferred scenario would be vulnerable to “extreme capitalism” instabilities, as towards the end of the whaling era, where companies inefficiently waste a lot of time and do a lot of damage frantically competing with each other for the rapidly rising but short-term profits from a rapidly dwindling resource. Markets do eventually correct their unsustainable trends even without strong regulation, as we saw recently in the US housing and financial products markets, but the process of correction can be pretty painful and destructive.

Do you mean explain it, Sam, or explain it in a way that makes you like it? Because if Obama called his team together and said, Hey, lets come up with something for Sam Stone, something that will just plain get on his nerves, it would be “Green jobs”. I can almost hear you gritting your teeth while you type.

From my viewpoint, on the conservative wing of the extreme left, it looks pretty sensible. If we could turn the spigot and generate profit-making jobs, we would, wouldn’t we? But that isn’t how it works. So we create jobs that wouldn’t otherwise be there to get something moving again.

Why not some green energy work? Not all of it, sure, but a goodly chunk. Lot of stuff we don’t know, be good if we did. Might find out its hopelessly impractical. Might find ways to make it more practical. Might get God Almighty lucky and discover something big.

(Here, Sam, bite down on this strap here, it’ll help…)

We’re gonna spend the money anyway. Might as well put down a bet on green energy.

(Damn, bit right through it!)

The OP is right. The govt wasted all that money on internet research and what good has that done for the economy?

Years ago I worked in a tiny factory that used Isopropyl Alcohol as a solvent, tons of it per week.

Only, they only paid for about a gallon per month.

The Production Manager and Maintenance Manager had gotten this bee in their collective bonnet, see, about being able to recycle the solvent through distillation, rather than pay for several truckloads every week and then basically tossing it into the river.

The Factory Manager/Controller wouldn’t hear a word of it. It was “environmentalist nonsense” and “he expected better from them.”

They convinced one of the owners to let them try it, building a distiller from old parts on their own time. It turned out that the cost of distilling the same alcohol again and again was about 1% of what buying it from a chemical supplier had been, but if it had been for the Money Man they would never have built that distiller.

The idea, not behind “green jobs” but behind having a “green jobs czar,” is to try and push companies out of the mindset that “it’s cheaper to pay an environmental or ethics fine than to actually try and take care of the environment” and into one of “you know, doing things right may actually be cheaper - let’s give it a try!”

Well, it’s partly feel-good pork. It may also be do-good pork.

This is a beautiful example of both the strengths and the weaknesses of a purely free-market approach to innovation. On the one hand, you’ve got the Production Manager and Maintenance Manager showing the intelligence, initiative, and dedication to come up with a new approach that will be not only environmentally friendly but a major cost-cutter, and donating their own time to implementing it. That’s a specific achievement by motivated, knowledgeable individuals that is much more effective than just throwing government grants or tax incentives at businesses indiscriminately.

On the other hand, you’ve got the Factory Manager who’s using his individual opinions and authority to actively discourage this admirable innovation. And if the other two guys had been less self-reliant and determined to show him they were right, the factory would probably still be following the same old polluting, money-wasting procedures for procurement and disposal of solvent. As we all know from dealing with dumb or unimaginative bosses at some time or other, the individual autonomy of business managers can choke off or hamper smart innovations at least as readily as it can foster and promote them.

The role of government in promoting particular new approaches or technologies isn’t to magically make everybody smarter or more innovative, but just to put a heavy thumb on the scales in favor of the innovative approaches when business leaders are weighing their options and making their choices. In Nava’s example, for instance, the Factory Manager might not have been so adamantly opposed to the other guys’ “environmentalist nonsense” if he learned that re-distilling the old solvent would qualify the company for a significant tax break, or something like that.

That’s what industrial policy in a mixed-capitalist economy is about: not autocratically decreeing everything that businesses must do, like Soviet central planners determining how many shoes a factory needs to make over the next five years, but rather re-weighting some of the costs and benefits so that businesses are more willing to re-think what they want to do.

The creation of an industry has some snags in the road. One of the snags is explaining “green jobs”. A lot of green jobs are simply jobs put to green tasks. An example of that is a chemical engineer that’s working to make a bleach that gets whites even whiter and the green equivalent is working to increase the yield output of photovoltaic cells greater. Same person, same skills, different task, green job. Some are retrofitters, because that’s what a lot of this is. Many states in America have no building codes at all. Eventually, there will have to be increased efficiency, and homes will have to have more foam blown into the walls, pipes modernized, windows sealed, etc. Also, when solar panels and windmills get to the point where it’s cost-productive to have them on your house, people will have to install them in your home. The really tricky part of it is the industry and the jobs that don’t exist yet, which are the next wave of these green jobs.

Another part of this is the “holy trinity” of Green Chemistry, which is a newer way of thinking chemistry through. Green Chemistry strives to create chemicals and products that are better than its toxic alternative, cheaper, and not dangerous to workers handling them.

If we solve the energy/environment problem, or at least go a long way to solving it, we can take a large chunk out of the other problems that we face. All of our Big Problems are interconnected, but I’d argue that none is more interconnected than the energy/environment problem.

Also, this generation, and the one preceding it have been done a huge disservice. We talk about how we need more math and science and engineering minds working, and how we don’t emphasize it enough. We could and should emphasize it and give this generation the Apollo Project and the Manhattan Project that it deserves.

Ah, profit. The best part of it. “All this environmental stuff doesn’t mean anything unless China and India do, and until they do, this puts us at a competitive disadvantage.” This is true, however, China and India have been proactive in some of these fields and have been churning out their own great engineering, mathematical, and scientific minds. This isn’t a space race. This is an energy race. The winner of this race gets this energy-to-be-named later and gets to sell it to the other parties, and even parties that aren’t in the race, because every country wants the outcome of this race.

Now, I don’t know how close to (or far from) the goal of clean, renewable energy we are. However, 50 years after we’ve accomplished it, we’ll look back upon these days and wonder why we weren’t more proactive on the matter. Then again, we do that a lot with our problems these days.

Cite, please.

Or do you mean to say, “Obama appointed an official whom people outside the Administration decided to call a “Green Jobs” czar”?

A pithy expression of exactly what I was thinking.

My job has morphed somewhat into a “green job”, in that of all the projects I’ve worked on or won myself in the last 1.5 years, almost 100% of them involve renewable energy of some sort, typically burning something renewable. Every power plant trip I’ve been on in the last year has been in part due to environmental concerns, save one case. The “green” effect has exploded into wind and solar installations which my company is doing as well, at a growth rate of perhaps more than 200% per year over the last 4 years. And that’s just the GHG emissions aspect of it; for a very long time perhaps 50% of our revenue is tied to meeting government-mandated emissions targets.

This aspect of my being “on the ground” and actually doing the studies has shown me that in most cases there is not going to be a good, practical way to reduce CO2 emissions significantly at the source. Reduce, yes, but until we get the demand-side down, improve energy efficiency, and enact strict population controls, I see no chance in this country nor the UK to meet GHG emissions targets.

There is no way in hell solar and wind power generators are cheaper than coal or we would be tripping over ourselves to build them. At best solar is a niche market limited to western arid states where solar/thermal shows promise. Wind generators are a maintenance joke. The newer design concepts that uses staged windings in place of complex transmissions shows promise but they are still not cheap to build, they are very limited by location and are an obnoxious thing to live next to. Geothermal is not even on the map. The best use of geothermal technology is at the micro-level where ground water is used to leverage the efficiency of heating/cooling systems. That is probably the only real technology that returns a savings.

Coal is by far the best short term solution to our energy needs. Any attempt to penalize it will burn the economy down and reduce funding for future technological upgrades.