Tag: green jobs

Shocker: Californian green job tax ‘didn’t work.’ Unless ‘impact crater’ counts.

Raise your hand, everybody who’s surprised: “Three years after California voters passed a ballot measure to raise taxes on corporations and generate clean-energy jobs by funding energy-efficiency projects in schools, barely one-tenth of the promised jobs have been created, and the state has no comprehensive list to show how much work has been done or how much energy has been saved.”

[lowering hand]

…What? I was surprised. I would have personally bet that California wouldn’t manage to get past one-twentieth.  To get a whole one-tenth must have involved people with whips. Or possibly cattle prods.

Continue reading Shocker: Californian green job tax ‘didn’t work.’ Unless ‘impact crater’ counts.

Let me sum up this WaPo article on “Where are the Green jobs?”

Actually, no, I don’t have to: this paragraph does most of it for me.

Not too long ago, we heard a lot about “green jobs”: The win-win equation for boosting employment while retrofitting America’s buildings, energy systems, and transportation infrastructure for a cleaner future. In 2009, the federal stimulus act poured $595 million into green jobs programs, most of which went towards equipping people with the skills to particulate in the new green economy. Four years later, it’s still not clear what all the cash for green jobs achieved–and a Government Accountability Office report issued last week illustrates the difficulty of trying to foster an emerging industry by pumping money into it.

All that’s missing is this common-sense observation: possibly there’s a reason why nobody’s done it that way, before? – Because, believe it or not, there are people out there who seem to think that the only reason why we don’t have abundant, clean, cheap, non-nuclear energy is because of… the Bavarian Illuminati, I guess. Or that corporate executives apparently have access to their own water, air, food, and planet to live on.  :rolls eyes: I should be grateful: at least nobody’s blaming the green jobs failure on the Jews.

:pause:

Yet.

Moe Lane

Sic Transit Gloria Green Jobs.

So…

  • Thanks to the Democrats, we spent 800 billion on a stimulus package that didn’t work.
  • Thanks to the Democrats, we allocated 92 billion of that money (meant to be spent on, well, things that would stimulate the economy) on renewable energy policies.
  • Thanks to the Democrats, we’ve managed to spend only about 20 billion of that money in a year and a half (remember; this was supposed to be emergency spending).
  • Thanks to the Democrats, our best-case scenario (via those mad optimists in the White House) is that the money spent netted us 191K jobs, or $105K a job. The Department of Energy estimates 82K jobs, or $244K/job.
  • And, thanks ever so much to the Democrats, “as much as 80 percent of some green programs, including $2.3 billion of manufacturing tax credits, went to foreign firms that employed workers primarily in countries including China, South Korea and Spain, rather than in the United States.”

You know, it used to be that you could count on the Democratic party to be provincial and short-sighted obstructionists when it came to putting the brakes on international trade, sure – but at least they used to know how to be competent provincial and short-sighted obstructionists. This is embarrassing.

Continue reading Sic Transit Gloria Green Jobs.

My Green Jobs suggestions.

You know, at first I was probably just a touch annoyed that the White House has spent billions – this is not an exaggeration; billions – on encouraging ‘green jobs’ without knowing what the heck a green job is:

Buried deep inside a federal newsletter on March 16 was something called a “notice of solicitation of comments” from the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Department of Labor.

“BLS is responsible for developing and implementing the collection of new data on green jobs,” said the note in the Federal Register, which is widely read by government bureaucrats and almost never seen by the general public. But the notice said there is “no widely accepted standard definition of ‘green jobs.'”

But then I saw this:

To help find that definition, the Labor Department asked that readers send in suggestions.

Suggestions?  Oh, I have suggestions: Continue reading My Green Jobs suggestions.