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Investors.com...
How Green Is Your
Lost Job?
Posted 03/01/2011
Power: A study of renewable energy in Scotland shows that for every job
created in the alternative energy sector, almost four jobs are lost in
the rest of the economy. We’ve seen this movie before.
Not only has the sun set on the British Empire, but the promise of wind
apparently is deserting it as well. A new study called “Worth The
Candle?” by the consulting firm Verso Economics confirms the experience
of Spain and other countries: The creation of “green” jobs destroys
other jobs through the diversion of resources and the denial of
abundant sources of fossil fuel energy.
The economic candle in the U.K. is being blown out by wind power. The
Verso study finds that after the annual diversion of some 330 million
British pounds from the rest of the U.K. economy, the result has been
the destruction of 3.7 jobs for every “green” job created.
The study concludes that the “policy to promote renewable energy in the
U.K. has an opportunity cost of 10,000 direct jobs in 2009-10 and 1,200
jobs in Scotland.” So British taxpayers, as is the case here in the
U.S., are being forced to subsidize a net loss of jobs in a struggling
economy.
“There’s a big emphasis in Scotland on the economic opportunity of
investing in renewable energy,” says study co-author and Verso research
director Richard Walsh. “Whatever the environmental merits, we have
shown that the case for green jobs just doesn’t stack up.”
Again, it’s been shown that wind energy can’t hold a candle to other
more traditional and more reliable forms of energy.
“The Scottish renewable sector is very reliant on subsidies from the
rest of the U.K.,” co-author Tom Miers adds. “Without the U.K.-wide
framework, it would be very difficult to sustain the main policy tolls
to promote this industry.”
As here, only continuous subsidies and redistribution of resources to
an unproductive and uncompetitive source of energy keeps the
alternative energy industry alive, politically and economically.
As the Telegraph’s James Delingpole reminds us in reporting the results
of the British study, “wind and solar power have proved a disaster in
Germany, Denmark and Spain (where Dr. Gabriel Calzada Alvarez
calculated that for every ‘green job,’ the country had destroyed 2.2
jobs in the real economy).”
If these numbers were extrapolated to America, instead of a touted 3
million-job gain from alternative energy, we should expect the loss of
at least 6.6 million jobs in other industries.
Calzada noted that these are direct job losses. “The loss of jobs could
be greater if you account for the amount of lost industry that moves
out of the country due to high energy prices,” he said in an interview.
Under a target agreed to with the European Union, Britain is committed
to generating nearly a third of its electricity from renewable sources,
mainly through building thousands of wind turbines.
The Daily Mail’s Christopher Booker calls the push for alternative
energy “the greatest scam of our age,” a statement we find hard to
disagree with.
Booker reports that in Britain, “To keep our homes warm we were having
to import vast amounts of power from nuclear reactors in France.” He
notes that the total usable output from Britain’s 3,500 turbines is no
more than a single conventional power plant, which is necessary as a
backup when the wind doesn’t blow.
These wind turbines are so expensive, according to Booker, that Holland
recently became the first country in Europe to abandon its EU
renewable-energy target, saving billions of euros.
Despite the evidence in country after country, we intend to repeat
their mistake.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar,
architects of the Obama administration’s economy-killing war on fossil
fuels, announced on Monday that the development of offshore wind farms
would be fast-tracked, with a goal of issuing leases off four Atlantic
Coast states by the end of the year.
Tilting at windmills will not create jobs, make us energy-independent
or save the earth.
Read it at Investors Business Daily
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