Window Repair Jobs
Tyler Cowen links to a good article that gets at the fallacy that suddenly obsoleting our energy infrastructure and having to rebuild it will be of net economic benefit.
Optimistically treating European Commission partially funded data, we find that for every renewable energy job that the State manages to finance, Spain's experience cited by President Obama as a model 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 9 jobs lost for every 4 created, to which we have to add those jobs that non-subsidized investments with the same resources would have created
Includes 1 million euros in government subsidies per wind job created.
In my mind, the green jobs mantra is a result of the CO2 abatement case becoming fatally weak, with supporters of legislation casting about for other justificaitons. From the very beginning, many of the most passionate folks are on the AGW bandwagon not because they really understand the science, but because the theory provided justification for a range of government actions (reduced growth, limited technology, reduced energy use, reduction in global trade -- even vegetarianism) that they supported long before AGW made the news.
Update: A quick note on a theme I harp on a lot - nameplate capacity for wind and solar is really, really misleading. In Spain in the study cited, wind operates at 19% of nameplate over the course of a year and solar operates at 8% (figure 3). The actual CO2 reduction is even worse, because, particularly for wind, fossil-fuel fired turbines have to be spinning on hot backup for when wind suddenly dies. Germany, the largest wind user in the word, found only 1,000MW of reduced fossil fuel plant needs from every 24,000 MW of wind capacity.
