Every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings. And every time an environmentalist speaks, new jobs miraculously appear. At least that's what most environmentalists want us to believe. Unfortunately, economics tells us something different.
From CNNMoney.com:
To hear environmentalists tell it, investing in renewable energy won't just provide a clean source of power, it will create an explosion of new jobs.
Estimates of just how many jobs our push to go green may generate vary widely, and not all economists believe that there really will be any kind of "green job" boom.
[...]
"You can never say for certain," said Drew Matus, a senior economist at Lehman Brothers. Still, the renewable sector is an obvious place to generate new jobs.
"New industries are where jobs are going to be created, because they are new," he said.
Duh. I love this strategy by reporters. The reporter probably asked something like "Where are new jobs created?" In response to an obvious question, the interviewee says something that, in isolation, sounds dimwitted. The reporter then reports the answer in isolation thereby making the expert look dimwitted. I only bring this up to defend some of the dimwitted things I have said to the press in the past. Back to the story...
Matus added that what's important is whether the new jobs created in the renewable energy industry offset jobs lost elsewhere, like in oil and gas.
If investment dollars are transfered from oil and gas to ethanol, then jobs will follow. It's the same as trying to tell the difference between economic impacts and economic welfare. When a hurricane rips through the U.S. gulf coast, new jobs are created. Should we tout the benefits of hurricanes as a policy option to battle unemployment?
I'm not saying there won't be any new jobs from heavier investments in renewables, but the relevant economic question is whether the reallocation of labor resources will result in a bigger economic pie--or are we just cutting the same pie into different size pieces?
Sterzinger [head of the Renewable Energy Policy Project] pointed out that Midwest farmers are currently commanding a higher price for their corn thanks to the boom in ethanol, and said money flowing into the region would soar if ethanol was more widely used.
Correction: "Midwest farmers are currently commanding a higher price for their corn thanks to the boom in ethanol bad government policy." Carry on.
"That would just pump million and millions back into he farm communities, which would create the secondary jobs as well," he said.
Gotta love those multipliers. But where are those millions and millions coming from?
But Robert Brusca, chief economist at Fact and Opinion Economics, a Manhattan consultancy, isn't convinced that ethanol production is necessarily creating new jobs.
He said lots of the new jobs in the biofuels sector could simply be filled with people shifted over from picking crops, in which case they wouldn't be new jobs at all.
Exactly...Fact and Opinion Economics?
