Tag Archives: Environmentalism

News

Cap and trade will raise electricity prices and increase unemployment

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Representative Michele Bachmann
Representative Michele Bachmann

Michele Bachmann has a post on her blog about a new study by a Spanish economist regarding the cost of green job initiatives.

Excerpt:

A study directed by Dr. Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor at Juan Carlos University in Madrid, concluded that every “green job” created in Spain resulted in 2.2 other jobs being destroyed.

The study emphasized that only 10% of the “green jobs” created could be considered permanent – such as maintenance of renewable power systems. The remaining jobs consisted of temporary jobs in construction, fabrication and installation jobs; along with administrative positions, marketing, and engineering projects.

Spain has been providing subsidies to create green jobs, and this is viewed by some as a model for future US energy policy.

Bachmann continues:

“If U.S. subsidies to renewable producers achieve the same result — and President Obama has held Spain up as a model for how to subsidize renewables — the U.S. could lose 6.6 million to 11 million jobs while it creates three million largely temporary ‘green jobs.'”

Furthermore, Dr. Calzada stated that “the loss of jobs could be greater if you account for the amount of lost industry that moves out of the country due to higher energy prices.”

Thomas J. Pyle of the Institute for Energy Research adds:

“As this study makes clear, Spain has spent billions in taxpayer resources to subsidize renewable energy programs in an effort to jumpstart its ailing economy – and what they’ve gotten in return are fewer jobs, skyrocketing debt and some of the highest and most regressive energy prices in the developed world. Now, as U.S. policy-makers prepare to embark Americans upon a similar course, this report offers our first realistic glimpse into what we should expect in return for that unprecedented sacrifice of public resources and personal autonomy.”

The IER has a list of the key findings from the study in that post.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air adds:

Why did the jobs disappear?  In part because of the higher capital confiscation of the government, and in part because the green policies pushed industry out of Spain. Actually, the study didn’t count jobs lost through “industrial relocation”, which in this case amounts to capital flight.  The largest stainless-steel producer in Spain directly linked its decision to move operations to South America to the higher energy costs imposed by the government.

In the US, we could see a massive flight, and not just in manufacturing.  High-tech industries that rely on cheap energy could be forced to find less expensive environments. Bloomberg’s economist notes that Microsoft and Google have already relocated their servers once to get cheaper energy.  The Internet is flexible enough to allow employers to go almost anywhere in the world to host their servers, and in this economy, there will be plenty of competition for them.

In a related post, Gateway Pundit notes that the cap and trade policies of the Democrats will also cause consumer electricity prices to soar.

Excerpt:

Democrats know that their cap and trade energy policies will devastate the economy.

…Cap and trade policies would likely cost American families $700 to $1,400 dollars per family per year according to the video above. The Department of Energy estimated GDP losses would be between $444 billion and $1.308 trillion over the 21-year period. Cap and trade also could cost the US 4 million jobs. In Missouri and the Midwest where energy is “cheap” it would cause electricity rates to double.

And, it would likely do nothing to help with the make-believe global warming junk science.

And GP also links to this video showing what we can expect from the Democrats on this issue:

Further study

I posted a list a while back of the expected increases in electricity prices, broken down by state, here. More about the impact on consumers from John Boehner is here.

More about the rise in unemployment we can expect from green jobs initiatives is here. Info about Obama’s tax hikes on energy producers is here. Information about possible carbon tariffs is here.

Information about the recent Cato statement of 700 scientists who dissent from man-made global warming is here.

News

Green policies will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs per year

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Gateway Pundit has the story here.

He cites Heritage Foundation research for these figures:

Perhaps the most alarming part is the price tag associated with attempting to reduce such a small part of the atmosphere and something we really cannot control. Our analysis shows the cumulative GDP losses for 2010 to 2029 approach $7 trillion. Single-year losses exceed $600 billion in 2029, more than $5,000 per house¬hold. Job losses are expected to exceed 800,000 in some years, and exceed at least 500,000 from 2015 through 2026. It is important to note that these are net job losses, after any jobs created by compliance with the regulations–so-called green jobs–are taken into account. In total, the “climate revenue” (read: energy tax) could approach two trillion over eight years. Keep in mind, this is all for negligible environmental benefits.

The Heritage Foundation piece also makes clear how much of an impact this will have on the planet’s temperature:

Out of the entire atmospheric makeup, only one to two percent is made up of greenhouse gases with the majority being nitrogen (about 78 percent) and oxygen (about 21 percent). Of that two percent, “planet-killing” carbon dioxide comprises only 3.62 percent while water vapor encompasses 95 percent. And of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, humans cause only 3.4 percent of annual CO2 emissions.

They have a nice graph that shows these numbers.

Ace of Spades also has nice graphs of solar activity and how well it coorelates to planetary temperature. You know, exactly in the way that CO2 doesn’t. (And Ace has a graph for that, too).

Further reading

I blogged about the United Nations’ plan to stop global warming with global wealth redistribution here. More on how much your energy prices will rise, the democrats plan to impose carbon-tariffs on imports, scientific dissent from catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, Al Gore’s refusal to debate and Obama’s plan to raise taxes on oil production.

Commentary

700 scientists dissent from global warming and 700 scientists dissent from Darwinism

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The fact-free, less-morally-demanding religion of anthropogenic global warming is running into evidential problems. When I wrote about global warming before, I noted that the real goal of the AGW-crowd is to seize control of the free market and implement socialism. Well, we’re getting socialism from the erudite Teleprompter-Reader, but that doesn’t mean we’ll lose the debate.

Scientific Dissent from Global Warming:

MYTH: The latest scientific studies predict more warming (H/T Independent Women’s Forum)

“…You go from a cooling regime to a warming regime or a warming regime to a cooling regime. …we were able to explain all the fluctuations in the global temperature trend in the past century,” Tsonis said. “The research team has found the warming trend of the past 30 years has stopped and in fact global temperatures have leveled off since 2001.”

“…if we don’t understand what is natural, I don’t think we can say much about what the humans are doing. …we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,” Tsonis said.

Tsonis said he thinks the current trend of steady or even cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades or until the next climate shift occurs.

MYTH: All the scientists agree that the recent warming period was man-made (H/T Club for Growth)

Fifty nine additional scientists from around the world have been added to the U.S. Senate Minority Report of dissenting scientists, pushing the total to over 700 skeptical international scientists… This updated report… includes yet another former UN IPCC scientist…

The over 700 dissenting scientists are now more than13 times the number of UN scientists(52) who authored the media-hyped IPCC 2007Summary for Policymakers. The 59 additional scientists hail from all over the world, including Japan, Italy, UK, Czech Republic, the U.S. and many are affiliated with prestigious institutions including, NASA, U.S. Navy, U.S. Defense Department, Energy Department, U.S. Air Force, the Philosophical Society of Washington (the oldest scientific society in Washington), Princeton University, Tulane University, American University, Oregon State University, U.S. Naval Academy and EPA.

MYTH: Green jobs will boost the economy (H/T Independent Women’s Forum)

[Myth #2 of 7]: These green jobs studies mistake any position receiving a paycheck for a position creating value.  Simply hiring people to write and enforce regulations, fill-out forms, and process paperwork is not a recipe for creating wealth. Much of the promised boost in green employment turns out to be in non-productive – and expensive – positions that raise costs for consumers. These higher paying jobs that fail to create a more eco-friendly society dramatically skew the results in both number of green jobs created and salary levels of those jobs.

[Myth #4 of 7]: Green jobs estimates promise greatly expanded (and pleasant and well-paid) employment. This promise is false. The green jobs model is built on promoting inefficient use of labor. The studies favor technologies that employ large numbers of people rather than those technologies that use labor efficiently. In a competitive market, the factors of production, including labor, are paid for their productivity. By focusing on low productivity jobs, the green jobs literature dooms employees to low wages in a shrinking economy. The studies also generally ignore the millions of jobs that will be destroyed by the restrictions imposed by governments on disfavored products and technologies.

Andrew Chamberlain of the Tax Foundation calculates that the cost of the myth of global warming alarmism, which resulted in Obama’s cap-and-trade legislation, would be 144.8 Billion dollars, with an average annual household burden would be $1,218, which would be approximately 2% of the average household income.

John Lott has a post where he links to a UK Telegraph article on media bias that covered two scientific conferences, one pro-AGW and one against AGW, in two completely different ways. The headline is “Nobody listens to the real climate change experts “. Indeed.

Scientific Dissent from Darwinism:

MYTH: There are no reputable scientists who dispute Darwinian evolution

There are over 700 reputable scientists who dissent from Darwinism!(it was 700 as of February 8, 2007, the list has grown even bigger today)

Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture today [February 8, 2007] announced that over 700 scientists from around the world have now signed a statement expressing their skepticism about the contemporary theory of Darwinian evolution. The statement, located online at www.dissentfromdarwin.org, reads: “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

…”We know intuitively that Darwinism can accomplish some things, but not others,” added Egnor. “The question is what is that boundary? Does the information content in living things exceed that boundary? Darwinists have never faced those questions. They’ve never asked scientifically if random mutation and natural selection can generate the information content in living things.”

…The list of signatories includes member scientists from National Academies of Science in Russia, Czech Republic, Hungary, India (Hindustan), Nigeria, Poland, and the United States. Many of the signers are professors or researchers at major universities and international research institutions such as Cambridge University, Moscow State University, Chitose Institute of Science & Technology in Japan, Ben-Gurion University in Israel, MIT, The Smithsonian and Princeton.

Really, these two myths are two sides of the same coin. Global warming and Darwinism are examples of politics masquerading as science. We’ve seen this before in the myths of global cooling in the 1970s, the steady-state model of the universe and nuclear winter.