Causing unicorns to poop green jobs
TOM BURGUM
Contributing Columnist
burgum@lbknews.com
Jonah Goldberg summed up the problem with the current debate on energy policy with one marvelous paragraph: “For years, environmentalists have been selling snake oil about energy policy, claiming that we can give up on nasty but affordable carbon-based energy such as coal, oil and gas and embrace wind, solar and geothermal (but not nuclear) at little to no cost. In fact, if you listen to people such as the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, switching to solar panels and wind farms will make us richer and more competitive, if not cause unicorns to poop ‘green jobs’ and rainbows as far as the eye can see.”
That Goldberg is right is nowhere better illustrated than when the environmentalist’s argument turns from economics to morality. The views of 16-year-old Daniel Judt were given voice in a New York Times op-ed piece on Sunday entitled “Generations in the Balance.” When explaining why he would have voted for Obama, he wrote, “I felt Mr. Obama knew how to do the right thing morally, even if it meant going against the ‘right thing’ politically.”
Young Daniel is disillusioned because, “They [the administration] see the environmental crisis in the same light as they see political debacles and economic woes.” From this, one has to assume that the young writer is upset that the president and his crew are not doing enough to change the way we use energy, not doing enough to “heal the planet.”
The reality may be unpleasant but continuing to rely on fossil fuels for the energy that lights our homes, runs our factories and propels our vehicles isn’t a matter of picking the political over the moral, it is simply recognizing reality. Wind and solar technologies are not going to replace oil at least for the foreseeable future. Oil is used for transportation (60 percent) and manufacturing (38 percent) while only 2 percent is used to produce electricity.
Coal is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. Even as Al Gore and the global warming crowd call for a freeze on new coal construction in the United States, the reality of increased reliance on coal in the coming decades is unfolding.
Worldwide coal consumption is expected to increase 48 percent by 2030. Coal supplies 49 percent of the electricity in the United States and 69 percent in China. India, a not-so-distant third in coal consumption, will increase its use 300 percent by 2020. China, which has now increased its coal use capacity to 200 percent of that of the United States, is building a new coal-fired generating station every 10 days.
The World Bank, famous for its pronouncements about how global warming will disproportionably affect the world’s poor, is, according to a Sunday Times of London report in 2009, spending billions to subsidize new coal-fired stations in developing countries. In 2008, the Asian Development Bank approved $850 million in loans to finance a coal-fired station in Gujarat, India. Marianne Fay, the bank’s chief economist for sustainable development, said: “There are a lot of poor countries which have coal reserves and for them it is the only option.” She then stated, “Frankly, it would be immoral at this stage to say, ‘We want to have clean hands, therefore we are not going to touch coal.’” She might have added, it would also be abysmally stupid to ignore a ready supply of cheap energy and India doesn’t have the luxury of being stupid.
Andrew C. Revkin, in a story in the New York Times April 9, 2008, summed up the argument over the loan to India thusly: “Is all of this bad? If you’re one of the climate scientists foreseeing calamity, yes. If you’re a village kid in rural India wanting a light to read by, no.”
No one should doubt that developing alternative energy makes sense. But, no one should ever believe that windmills, solar panels and biofuels can replace fossil fuels, at least for decades to come. Forget the ridiculous claim that government subsidies will help create five million new green jobs. Spain tried that trick and it didn’t work out. The Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, one of Spain’s leading universities, did a critical analysis of Spain’s experience in the creating-green-jobs business. This is important because candidate Obama referred to Spain’s green-job experiment as a model for the United States. According to Columnist Tony Blankley, the study found that, “Treating the data optimistically—for every renewable-energy job that the government finances, ‘Spain’s experience…reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about nine jobs lost for every four created.” Thus, if we actually succeed in creating five million new green energy jobs, we might expect to lose as high as 11 million other jobs. At least that has been Spain’s experience.
Tom Friedman often sites China’s venture into production of solar panels as a model for the United States. Ninety-nine percent of these panels were for export, not for use in China. Mr. Friedman doesn’t mention that, does he? Still, I guess it would be inaccurate to claim that solar and wind won’t create green jobs. Question is, where will they be produced? Most likely it will be in the countries with ample cheap power for manufacturing: That will be the countries using coal—most likely China and India.
Regardless of the claims from environmentalists and our political leaders, when the year 2030 dawns, fossil fuels will still be providing 80 percent of the world’s energy—the unicorns and rainbows will still be waiting in the wings.
you answered your own query – green electricity is a technique to acquire more tax bucks and power