The Fiction of Green Power

Friday's Wall Street Journal carried an interesting editorial on the misleading promises of Wonderboy's administration regarding "green" power and jobs. Written by Max Schulz of the Manhattan Institute, entitled "Don't Count on 'Countless' Green Jobs," the piece debunks the liberal myth of huge numbers of new jobs that will flow from the 'greening' of our power generation.

According to Schulz, the First Rookie promised, in his campaign, to spend $150B over 10 years to create 5MM jobs involving wind, solar and other renewable energy sources.

As Schulz writes,

"If the green-jobs claim sounds too good to be true, that's because it is."

He goes on to point out that green energy sources are, in truth, uneconomical. They require huge subsidies to become viable.

Schulz notes that solar energy gets a $24.34/megawatt-hour subsidy, while wind power receives $23.37. By comparison, coal gets 44 cents per mwh, nuclear $1.59, and natural gas receives 25 cents/mwh in subsidies.

So, basically, those 5MM jobs are being paid for, by you, the taxpayer, not just by $150B of investment, but untold and literally uncounted, unpublished billions of dollars of subsidy payments.

As Schulz demonstrates, with simple logic, shifting US power generation to 25% "clean sources," as Wonderboy is promising, effectively raises the cost of power generation via these subsidies.

As a result, manufacturing jobs will vanish, because industries needing power migrate from high-cost locations to lower-cost locations. California and New York- two states already financially crippled- can say "goodbye" to some more power-dependent jobs in the next few years, if Wonderboy has his way.

According to Schulz' research, the US oil and gas industry creates some 1.6 jobs, while coal provides hundreds of thousands of direct and derivative jobs.

Gone, with the new focus on inefficient, expensive renewables to power US industry and residences.

Then there will be the effective tax increase of paying for those higher, subsidized rates on power generated with all this new clean, unaffordable technology.

Yes, quite the prescription for a recession, isn't it? The worst, according to Wonderboy, since the 1930s. Another lie, but, by now, who's counting.

The important thing is, amidst a softening US economy, the Democratic administration plans to increase the cost of energy, throw existing oil, gas and coal workers out of work, as well as workers in sectors dependent upon low-cost power, and throw more billions at inefficient new energy sources which still won't be sufficient to do the heavy lifting of American industry.