Sort of like how sports prognostication eludes this president.
President Barack Obama heads to an energy plant in North Carolina on Monday to talk once again about the job-creating power of a green economy.
The catch? Nearly three years into Obama’s presidency, the White House can’t point to much solid evidence that significant numbers of Americans are scoring the green jobs the president has been touting.
Monthly Labor Department employment reports say nothing about the new clean energy workforce, while an effort to document how many Americans actually make a living in the “green collar” field may not be done by November 2012.
So Team O extrapolates and infers, and then sends some more of your money down a giant green rat hole.
Obama’s team also touts public investments it hopes will prompt private spending and lower costs for the clean energy industries of tomorrow. And all that may take a little time.
“You know, it’s just like if you had a bad illness, if you got hit by a truck, it’s going to take a while for you to mend,” Obama said earlier this month during a visit to a Chrysler auto plant in Toledo, Ohio. “And that’s what’s happened to our economy. It’s taking a while to mend.”
And it takes even longer to mend if the truck keeps coming back to run you over again. That, according to a new study on “green” jobs, is exactly what’s happening. Truck Driver Obama keeps returning to smash his victims.
Two of the EPA’s proposed regulations would be among the most expensive ever imposed by the agency on coal-fueled power plants, dramatically increasing electricity rates and natural gas prices and leading to substantial job losses, according to a new analysis by National Economic Research Associates (NERA).
The analysis was sponsored by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), but relies on government data for almost all of its assumptions. NERA projects that EPA’s proposals would result in employment losses of over 1.4 million job-years by 2020 and increase electricity rates by over 23 percent in some areas of the United States. A job-year is one job for one year. In addition, consumers will be paying over $8 billion per year in higher natural gas prices because of the proposed rules.
The study found that for every one “green” job created, we’ll lose four non-green jobs thanks to these two EPA regs, the Transport Rule and its Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT). And when we predictably lose these jobs, the media will report it as another unexpected! hit to the economy, of course.
It’s not unexpected at all, to anyone who has taken a look at what an emphasis on “green” jobs has done to Spain.
If the Obama admin really really wants to see an economic boom, it should just get out of the way. But liberals are too smart to think of that.
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