Someone Explain 'Green Jobs', Please.

Great Debates
41

Emphasis added. Sam, in one breath you claim that technological innovations from government investment can’t be planned, and in the next breath you say that there needs to be an actual plan for them. Which do you mean?

Well, your OP seemed so clueless about the whole “green jobs” issue that we tried to provide easy-to-understand overviews for you. If you’re now ready for more detailed information, I’m happy to oblige. For instance, if you want plans from economists, you could try the 2000 book Blueprint for a Sustainable Economy by the late University College London economist David William Pearce and Edward Barbier.

The rest of the grumpfest that is your most recent post seems to be mostly your own cite-free bloviating about how you personally think the private sector is already doing everything worthwhile to develop environmentally sustainable technologies, so government involvement would be just a waste of money.

But Sam, it’s pretty much an axiom with you that the private sector is always doing everything worthwhile and government involvement is always a waste of money, so I wouldn’t really expect you to say anything different no matter what the actual facts are.

If you come up with some serious sources arguing on the basis of detailed evidence that “green economy” strategies are worthless, I’ll be happy to read them and discuss their claims as compared to those of serious sources arguing for the other side. But if you’re just kvetching that you personally don’t see any value in “green economy” strategies, there’s nothing to debate. Of course you personally would naturally be very unlikely to see any value in them, because they offend your ideology.

Bring out some anti-green-economy sources that are more than just the personal grouchings of a market-fundamentalist ideologue, and then we’ll have something to debate.

42

Perhaps, but you have some amazing blinders, mate, amazing.

I’m not up on my American Gov structure or developments (don’t really give such a fuck about it), but I thought he was merely a political coordinator, political man to push things forward. Unless the American Gov is vastly different from those I know best, one needs a “whip” to move things through bureaucracy and parliament, and there unless the fellow was supposed to be making technical calls, technical expertise is merely nice to have relative to relationship skills.

Now what I read tells me he probably did not have the relationship skills, but the rest of your indictment is pretty much a non-indictment of someone looking to find fault… I would stand corrected if he was supposed to be policy decision maker of course, again versus Initiative Whip.

Seems to me you reached your conclusion before the facts.

I am no lover of Government myself. Too often the Dead Hand, but ideological blinders to potential value are not helpful either. And mind you, it makes your critiques fairly unreasonable.

43

The title is The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems

The Amazon compendium of reviews from contains nothing about any of that.

Have you done any “research” on this outside of your usual blogs? :dubious:

44

Wanxiang America Corp. (a Chinese firm) is building a solar panel manufacturing facility in Rockford, Illinois. They’re also leasing hundreds of acres from the Rockford Airport to create the largest solar farm in the country.

I mainly found it interesting that Wanxiang decided that Illinois, USA was the best place to open a solar panel facility and employ Illinois workers. I assume they plan to sell the panels to US businesses and its cheaper/easier to manufacture them here than in China. To tie this in with the government, it was $2mil in incentives (taxes mainly, I’d guess) that brought to to Illinois and not some other state.

45

You are all getting bogged down …

A green job can ALSO be changing from going into a office/call center to working from home, saving the fuel and seriously reducing the carbon footprint, reducing the cost of maintaining and operating the vehicle. When I got changed to telecommuting, I went from a round trip of 100 miles per day, and paying a higher premium on my insurance for working in Hartford, to driving 100 miles once a month [or sometimes twice] and reducing my insurance to a lesser scope [went from the over 75 miles per day to the minimum other than unemployed/retired rate] and reduced my auto maintenance accordingly.

Now mrAru is the only one commuting, and he is doing it in a diesel car that gets 43 miles per gallon … [and I got laid off, so Im not commuting even 1 day a month] and he is working on getting into his companies telecommute program.

46

If telecommuting is a Green Job then the term really is as meaningless and foolishly political as Stone claims.

47

Why should it be political at all? Its is, or ought to be, far more a question of technology and practicality than of political persuasion. But as in so many circumstances, if change is the reasonable choice, then resistance to change is unreasonable. Progressives favor change (well, duh!) while conservatives resist change. But that certainly isn’t our fault, not a day goes by when I don’t offer encouragement and counsel to help a conservative free himself from political error.

But if the challenge of practicality can be met, then the conservative resistance will fade, because they will be offered the opportunity to make a buck off it. Exxon will sell me sunshine just as cheerfully as they sold me air pollution. They can be very understanding and flexible, in that regard.

48

It falls under the concept because its a greening application of an already established industry. The fact of the matter is that the world has probably gone through some green changes historically , we just called it going from the industrial age to the information age.

Where that green tsar could have done a better job was to ensure that the federal govt led the way in setting an example by looking at its own house and seeing what could be greened. Somethings can be legislated, others can be incentived but the marketing for green has failed.

You have a lot of smart people out there who ask the same questions that sam did , and they dont care how they make money, call it green , red , purple economy. If I cant explain a business plan to those guys , it comes down to no bucks , no buck rogers.

Declan

49

Other than the “… new program of rebates and tax credits, which took effect July 31, could revive the market…”, what was the government’s investment in this particular company? The article mentioned investments, but it made it sound more like it was venture capital rather than the government doing the investing.

Pickens had a plan, and it was green. As in green for T Boone.

The electric grid where Pickens wanted to place his wind farm has significantly cheaper electricity than the ERCOT grid that serves the rest of the state. So instead of just generating electricity and selling it for the cheaper rate, he needed a few hundred miles of transmission lines to get it downstate. Say the DFW area.

No problem, surely nobody would stand in the way of such a noble venture, he was sure to get the land condemned for right-of-way. And even if he didn’t, he said he’d just build the transmission lines himself.

Cut to Roberts County, TX. A county with less than 1000 people, most of the land unfit for irrigated farming due to its proximity to the breaks leading to the Canadian River. Pickens buys the water rights from many of the landowners so he can pump their allotment from the Ogallala aquifer. Due to the low population of the county, all he needs are 5 people to vote in an election to establish a water district that would give him the right to condemn right-of-way to lay dual 96" pipelines to the DFW market. As luck would have it, Pickens had 5 employees living in Roberts county (his ranch is also there, Dick Cheney is a frequent visitor), the water district vote was passed.

Pickens now stood to make an estimated $165 million by selling water from the Ogallala aquifer, and he had right-of-way to build his transmission lines.

Except the Texas Public Utilities Commission (I think, it’s been a while) shot down his 5 member water district.

The wind farm was shelved at the same time due to lack of getting the right-of-way for the water pipelines.

Pickens also was an advocate of burning natural gas in cars as part of his plan, and who better to sell all this natural gas than Pickens.

I don’t argue that his wind farm was an ambitious project, but it was so chock full of ulterior motives that many people around here came to despise it/him mainly over the water. There’s plenty of wind here, sell all you want, water is fairly scarce to be selling just because you despise the area you are pumping it from.

There are plenty of wind farms in the area that don’t need transmission lines to DFW, the water was just a personal grudge Pickens has with the area. He tried to sell water to the conservation district and some cities for more than they wanted to pay, so he bought many water rights as a way to leverage his clout.

Now several wind farm companies are pooling their resouces to tie into the downstate grid, making it much easier for somebody with plans of a huge wind farm to tap into that market, while Pickens is selling the 667 wind turbines he pre-ordered to start the project.

50

Sam, can I ask a dumb question?

Why do you keep calling this guy a ‘Czar’?

51

Because that’s the way he was described in a number of news articles. I didn’t realize it had negative connotations for you. I’m a little fuzzy on what makes someone a ‘czar’ anyway. Is the title inaccurate?

52

Well, apparently the wingnuts (including Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, who I wouldn’t have previously characterized as a wingnut) are all up in arms about all the ‘czars’ in the Obama Administration.

Apparently part of your beef is that this guy is a ‘czar.’ So: what gives?

53

That and the level of political corruption helped make them feel at home. :wink:

54

“News”?

Oh, how precious!

You didn’t make *any *connection with these “news” sources of yours trying to portray this administration as creating socialism and creeping totalitarianism? Really? Come on now.

One should know what a word means before using it.

Jones’ title was Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), as half a second on Google could have told you.

55

Forgot to link to Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s largely fact-free rant about the evil and unaccountable czars of the Obama Administration.

Can’t believe the WaPo prints this garbage.

56

Why? They have morphed into a neocon publication.

57

She’s running for Governor now. Gotta re-establish her cred with the wingnuts who constitute her voting base.

58

I keep thinking they at least have pretensions of caring about the facts.

My bad.

59

While she’s concentrating on the wing nut base, she’s ignoring the PEM nuts, swage nuts, and J-nuts, not to mention the whole other range of self-locking threaded fasteners, rivets, clasps, buckles, cotter pins, masonary anchors, and paper clips. Diversity in connections is the key to a successful design.

I find this thread to be remarkably fact-free with regard to what a “green job” is, and it is clear that the o.p., despite his political rants, doesn’t know either. There is clearly money to be made and saving to be had in improving energy efficiency in production, transmission, and consumption (as evidenced by Una Persson’s post) and value to the US as a whole to support and encourage the development of this industry versus expanding extraction of finite energy resources. I haven’t seen enough detail from the current Administration to see whether they offer a realistic plan to further develop this industry or not, nor does it seem anyone else here has, either.

Stranger

60

Defining that was essentially Jones’ job, as I understand it.