The Green Jobs Boondoggle
When it comes to direct waste tied to GGS jobs, the Department of Energy (DOE), which produces no energy, knows no peer.
In early September 2011, the Washington Post reported that the 2009 stimulus plan’s $38.6 billion loan-guarantee program targeting green energy companies “has directly created 3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount.” Let’s see; $18.8 billion (the actual amount disbursed at the time) divided by 3,545 works out to $5.3 million per job. We’d have been much better off paying each new worker a couple hundred grand a year just to stay home.
Oh, but this is all supposedly okay, because these are only “loan guarantees.” Most of the money will get paid back, and the government won’t lose all that much, right? Wrong. Think Solyndra, Beacon Power, Ener1, and at least a half-dozen others. And they’re not done: The Wall Street Journal reported on March 23 that DOE “has placed nearly one-third of its clean-energy loan portfolio (10 of 32) on an internal ‘watch list’ for possible violations of terms or other concerns.” I suspect that there’s little reason to feel good about the other 22.
Subsequent events have shown that the administration’s green jobs obsession has been a monstrous waste of time and money on two levels. First, experience in the real world outside of rigged computer models based on missing raw data has shown that the link between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and alleged global warming is weak at best. CO2 has been increasing, but there’s been no net warming since 1998.
Second, fossil-fuel resource discoveries and recent advances in extraction technology have been so dramatic that, according to a recent report by Citigroup analysts, it is not unreasonable to believe that “North America’s production of oil and natural gas liquids (can) almost double to 26.6m barrels a day by 2020.”
That won’t happen if Obama and his bunch remain in charge after January 20, 2013 — which is yet another reason why the nation’s voters can’t allow it to happen.
And most of those jobs are in candyland where your paid in gumdrops and taxes are paid in dippin dots
Green jobs are as real as the science behind global warming
Thank you Joseph Goebbles
Stuart Varney ran thru some “re-definitions” that were used. Among these, farmers who grow organic crops. A bus driver who drives a hybrid bus. Who knew Obama would turn even the BLS into partisan hacks?
I’m not too sure what this administration’s definition of a “green” job is. If you are hired for a day to clean up rubbish from a small park, is THAT a “green job?” If you are hired for two days to repair a bike path in a suburb, is THAT a “green job?” If you rake leaves on the side of the road, is THAT considered a “GREEN JOB?” I think the administration is lumping in a lot of other jobs that shouldn’t really be qualified as a “GREEN JOB,” whatever they may be. Because, if you are only counting on the production of wind or solar energy, you’re probably talking about less than one percent of the total manufacturing output of this country. And are these “GREEN JOBS” permanent? Well, just ask the staff at Solyndra if they are.
Libertyship46, you are absolutely correct. Yours are good examples of how job statistics are padded. You could say that the guy who drives an 18 wheeler loaded with solar panels has a green job. You see the same type of job padding when a large construction project is proposed and it is announced that it will create 3,000 construction jobs. The only way you can arrive at a number like that is to include every truck driver who makes a one time delivery to the construction site and every sub contractor who shows up for a small job that might take one or two days. And of course not many of these jobs are actually “created” because most of the people who will be working on the project already have jobs to begin with.
The energy sector is based on efficiency – how much energy we can get out of a resource at the lowest cost. A reasonable energy policy would seek to produce the most energy at the lowest cost (including fewest employees).
Why would we want legions of “green energy” people dragging down our economy with less efficient efforts? What illogical nonsense.
Barack Obama is in the tank of Big Oil, all of the “environmentalists” are owned by Big Oil. The proof is in the subsidies.
Obama “claims” that he wants a replacement for oil but subsidizing technology that doesn’t work only increases Big Oil’s stranglehold on the energy market. Every solar cell and wind turbine that’s manufactured just generates more profit for Big Oil. If the Bamster really cared about “Green Energy” then he’d force it to compete; he’d force it to get bigger, faster, stronger and then suit up against the big boys. But he doesn’t, he encourages “Green Energy” to hide in the locker room and redraw the same 30 year-old plays on the chalk board. By subsidizing products that don’t work he’s canceling research into things that might work, but that’s the plan because he’s owned by Big Oil.
Who knew Big Oil was so dastardly? Who knew that they’d be able to stop the competition before it started? All it took was a pile of other peoples’ money, a bit of bad press, and viola “Green Energy” is crippled beyond repair. Big Oil is smart, far smarter than the environmentalists, because Big Oil knows that government destroys everything it touches and Big Oil caused the government to do a lot more than touch “Green Energy” (let’s just say contraception was required).
Big Oil knew that the free market would someday find the next great energy source so Big Oil had a choice: crush each new competitor year after year or allow government to cripple all competition. Big Oil is diabolically clever so with a few well placed words they caused government to move “Green Energy” out of the free market and to forever doom it. Remember… Dick Cheney is Big Oil and Barack Obama is Cheney’s puppet.
Please explain those oil “subsidies” in detail. I hear politicians refer to them constantly, but never explain them.
They have different rules for depreciating assets, which may have some minor tax benefit, but I know of no other special treatment of oil firms.
The subsidies I’m alluding to are the subsides that “Green Energy” gets to be in bed with government. I’m referring to Solyndra, A123 and all the other parasites feeding at the taxpayer trough.
The post is a “logical” explanation of why politicians keep funding something they know can never work. It’s all a great “Big Oil” conspiracy. It’s sarcasm… or is it?
Obama blasts big oil, trying to cut their subsidies, while he subsidizes Brazil’s offshore drilling. And he tolerates the import ban on ethanol from abroad while promoting corn ethanol output here. The man is crazy.
“The man is crazy……..” No, it’s the domestic sugar production industry that keeps tariffs sky high on Brazilian sugar cane ethanol.
What hit me some time ago when the first green government-fronted industry went T.U. is that Obama is no big fan of green energy or anything like that. He’s using it as a means to an end. 1)He can appear to support green energy, thus giving him the credentials necessary to shut down/shut out conventional energy production and get the backing of the idiots who think butterfly farts can power your lawnmower and 2)He can throw money away in dump-truck levels. It’s another way to further deplete the cash supply of tax-payer dollars whereby it helps further damage the economy.
It’s not stupid, as far as he’s concerned; It’s quite clever. The amazing thing is that the people who usually run the green-boondoggle cons think they got one over on the US govt. They’re back-slapping one-another, laughing at “that idiot president” while they, themselves are blindly ignorant of the fact that he’s all for it but not for the reasons they think. He just needed a money toilet and they were happy to have the cash, and he was happy to flush it.
The fact that the media hasn’t caught on to the game is very telling as well as the fact that most of us conservatives think he’s supportive of green energy. No he’s not. He just wants as many ways as he can to spend more money. This fits in with his ridiculous usage of the big jet and anything else that’s on tax expenditures. When the people wake up, some years from now and note that this administration probably is outspending any other by a factor of ten to one, just in their daily affairs, it will come as quite a shock.
By virtue of the fact that there appears to be little outcry over the deficit that he’s managed to spend in three years what took 236 years to reach is maddening. I guess to the national socialists who think breaking our backs is fine in order to achieve a totalitarian government isn’t that obvious after all.
Obama is probably of the belief that the US actually is full of stupid people for not catching on to it at all.
To me, it’s obvious. Spend it. Spend it all. Ruin us financially and the people will scream for the “government to save them” and thus, they will come up with ways, just like history has shown by taking over banks (in-process) industries (in-process) and more regulations (also in-process).
How hard can it be to see?
There is also a fuzzieness in the Green Jobs math that goes beyond the initial reports.
Solyndra, added X permanant green jobs when they got the loans, However, when they shut down, those ‘permanent’ green jobs were never subtracted from the totals.
Interesting, what?
Want to see some green jobs, lots of ‘em? Hey, we need more grave diggers. Modify the federal law requiring all hospitals to provide medical care regardless of ability to pay to mean palliative care if so desired at the sole discretion of the hospital. Can’t pay or pass the wallet triage, the folks in white will provide you a cheap morphine drip until expiration. I fail to see why the victims of the drive by shootings should have to pay for the gang banger’s ER bill just so the shooter gets a second chance to shoot again. I can see the green shoots of those growing Daisies now. More grave diggers, fewer lawyers, yeah! Bet that would bring down health care costs.
A question: Does anyone know the terms of the Federal loan guarantees? It seems to me that the taxpayers are in a lose/lose position. If the company defaults on the base loan, the loan guarantee comes into play. But if the company succeeds, all the taxpayers get is a nominal fee for providing the guarantee. In other words, there’s no upside for the taxpayers. In conventional venture capital, losses are expected — most start-ups fail — but the win hopefully has a large enough payoff to cover the losses and produce an overall profit. How can the taxpayer win with loan guarantees?
Now THAT’S what I’m talkin’ about, Mr. Blumer. Not only did you adequately cite and reference your sources, but you also included one of the essential lies driving the “green” economics deception – so-called CO2-induced anthropogenic global warming (a.k.a. AGW; or what Ed Driscoll yesterday inclusively referred to as “global warming/climate change/climate chaos/whatever it’s called this week” [for the sake of the two or three leftists who actually read his well-researched articles]).
Readers interested in researching this issue further are invited to visit Another Slow News Day’s various blog pages devoted to “green” jobs…
http://anotherslownewsday.wordpress.com/green-jobs/
… and several other related topics such as the “green” economics deception in general and the AGW hoax. Access to those pages (and dozens of others) is obtained by browsing the various branches on ASND’s Update Topics menu tree.
Keep in mind that they can classify things that we’ve been doing for a long time – such as treating sewage – as “green” activities. I’m sure most of those “green jobs” were activities that were very much a part of the economy in 1962.
Yep. They even include hydroelectric power, which goes back to the 1930s (Hoover Dam, TVA).
Carbon and Life
-It is hard to overstate the importance of carbon; its unique capacity for forming multiple bonds and chains at low energies makes life as we know it possible, and justifies an entire major branch of chemistry – organic chemistry – dedicated to its compounds. In fact, most of the compounds known to science are carbon compounds, often called organic compounds because it was in the context of biochemistry that they were first studied in depth.
-What makes carbon so special is that every carbon atom is eager to bond with as many as four other atoms. This makes it possible for long chains and rings to be formed out of them, together with other atoms – almost always hydrogen, often oxygen, sometimes nitrogen, sulfur or halides. The study of these is the basis of organic chemistry; the compounds carbon forms with metals are generally considered inorganic. Chains and rings are fundamental to the way carbon-based life forms – that is, all known life-forms – build themselves.
-Silicon is capable of forming the same sorts of bonds and structures, but opinion is divided on whether silicon-based life forms are a realistic prospect – in part because it needs higher energies to form them, and in part because whereas carbon dioxide (one of the main by-products of respiration, a process essential to all known life) is a gas and therefore easy to remove from the body, its counterpart silicon dioxide (silica) has an inconveniently high melting point, posing a serious waste disposal problem for any would-be silicon-based life form.
Very interesting. More environmentalists went to law school than have graduated with a chemistry degreee.
I always though that global warning was hoax. If all that carbon gets pushed into the atmosphere then it will get cycled back into the planet via faster growth of plant material around the planet. I think they call it a carbon cycle.
The scientific theories that get pushed to the fore by the media and get funded in universities are that promote liberalism
I worry more about excess goverment than excess carbon.
Beware of political buzz words. There is no real meaning to them; that is their purpose. Politicians use pejorative words to stir up their base, without saying anything. Examples: Saturday Night Specials, Green jobs, Government giveaways. Depending on your bigotry, they engender hatred, fear, or agreement, but none have a clear meaning. This allows “leaders” to do things that normally would render them unemployed. If our money is not to become totally worthless, it is vital, for survival, that these slight of hand terms be coldly challenged.
A case in point- the Department of Energy. The main purpose of this huge bureaucracy is the care and feeding of America’s thermonuclear weapons. Most moderns think it’s role is energy, a fundamental error in perception. President Eisenhower created it to assure that the military would not have sole control on devices which could annihilate all life forms. Since the world’s consensus is that all nations have made far too many of these devils, DoE’s main purpose is assure that these aged devices work when we want them to, and at no other time. There is a shelf life to consider; bombs rot. But that is no longer sexy, so thousands of aging experts have floundered into a world they have never lived in, commercial energy. They all want a rice bowl, but in this world, costs are all important. All Americans know what $4/ gallon means. No one knows the cost of an H bomb. This national ignorance has led us to solar energy, a near useless source of grid energy. Why? Cost. The more green energy we make, the poorer we will become, because it is far too expensive to use.
If our political buzz words are stripped away, our technical choice is starkly clear: If the climate change sciences are correct, if Carbon Dioxide is a near and lethal threat to mankind, then we must, quickly, abandon the basis of our energy fuel, carbon. This will most certainly collapse our economy; Americans will starve in large numbers. Large, poorer nations will be in worse shape if they abandon their sole means of survival. History indicates that such an epic change in global economies will probably lead to world war. (This latter is conjecture on my part; the former is my certainty.)
Job boondoggles are about waste and fraud. This green movement is a far more serious issue.
I like the Monty Python skit where gangsters were trying to extort an Army Colonel. “Nice Army base you have here.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRm5WcjOikQ
DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY COLUMN: A GOOD WEEK FOR THE GOOD GUYS – FINALLY
http://freebeacon.com/democrats-in-disarray/
“the administration’s green jobs obsession has been a monstrous waste of time and money”
That’s because they don’t create green jobs in the most efficient manner. Only a few days ago, an economics expert in energy, gave a statement to a Finance Subcommittee on Energy, with the perfect cost effective solution to the creation of millions of green jobs: http://lftrsuk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/millions-of-green-jobs-lets-dig-ditches.html
Yes a massive waste of money that could have been used much more effectively by funding (through low interest loans not grants) energy efficiency programs. ARRA did provide funding for the incubation of energy efficiency programs that have a real chance of being effective. The U.S. wastes tens of billions of dollars each year because of inefficient buildings. The movement toward energy efficiency will free up these dollars in our economy. Why this administration hasn’t touted this is beyond me.
The latest fad among the enviros is the proclamation of so-called green energy and the green jobs as a solution to our myriad energy woes. Unfortunately, for the enviros and the rest of us SAPS it’s all a matter of physics and, as such, not only will it (i.e., green energy) not work, it can’t work. Several commenters more astute than I postulate reasonable reasons as to why green jobs won’t work but none strike at the crux of the problem: How in the heck did we get ourselves into this mess and how do we get ourselves out of it?
If they passed carbon trading they thought they could rebuild the middle class with guys installing solar panels.
Even with significant subsidies, only the the most brainwashed nutty professor types put solar panels on their houses.
English is a great language. It allows for all sorts of parsing. Allow me to try:
1. “Almonds”, have a pronounced “L” while hanging in the tree. Once they hit the ground the word is pronounced “Amond” (AH-mand). Why? Because the fall knocked the “L” out of the little nut.
2. “BLS” or, Bureau of Labor Statistics suffers the same change and for the same reason. Once the stats hit reality and have the “L” kicked out of them, they are, in the end, just statistics or, “BS.”
Yes the spirit of Van Jones lives on. Isn’t his middle initial “L”?
I tried to change my profile picture, i selected a random image and it started loading but it never completed. Yes, i’m talking about my Avatar/Profile picture which doesn’t responds. Even if the loading gets completed, the profile picture does not shows..
Help me please