Thursday, January 31, 2008

Bill's Economic Stimulus Plan: Green Jobs   [Iain Murray]

Jonah, I can't believe I'm writing this, but I'm not sure Jake Tapper is being entirely accurate when he characterizes Bill Clinton's remarks on global warming yesterday as "We just have to slow down our economy."  Clinton's remarks actually suggest that doing that would not help as "China and India and Indonesia and Vietnam and Mexico and Brazil and the Ukraine, and all the other countries will never agree to stay poor to save the planet for our grandchildren," which is an accurate assessment of the situation.  Bill could have gone further and said that it is actually immoral to suggest otherwise, but, hey, you take what you can get.

Where Bill goes off the rails is in his pie-in-the-sky vision of a green tomorrow, which brings to mind the end of the Goobacks episode of South Park:

If you want that in America, if you want the millions of jobs that will come from it, if you would like to see a new energy trust fund to finance solar energy and wind energy and biomass and responsible bio-fuels and electric hybrid plug-in vehicles that will soon get 100 miles a gallon, if you want every facility in this country to be made maximally energy efficient that will create millions and millions and millions of jobs, vote for [guess who?]

The idea that completely changing our energy system will create millions of new, extra jobs, is like suggesting, as one commentator noted in The Guardian of all places, that the permanent abolition of the wheel would lead to a bonanza of new jobs in the blacksmithing, livery and farriery (?) industries.  Planet Gore's own Ken Green noted in Congressional testimony recently that the promise of green jobs is largely illusory, and yesterday drew attention to the fact that current global warming legislation will actually lose jobs:

Economist Anne Smith testified to Congress that her state-of-the-art economic modeling estimates that Warner-Lieberman would cause net reduction in 2015 GDP of 1.0% to 1.6% relative to the GDP that would otherwise occur. That loss rises to the range of 2% to 2.5% after 2015. Smith found that the annual loss in GDP would increase to the range of $800 billion to $1 trillion, which is serious money. By 2020, Smith estimates losses of 1.5 to 3.4 million jobs - and that is net jobs, after adjusting for the new "green" jobs that might be created by the bill.

So while Tapper isn't entirely accurate in characterizing what Bill said, he's pretty accurate in summarizing the effects of the policies he recommends.  Bill Clinton's economic stimulus plan is to slow down our economy.

01/31 11:41 AMShare