Al Gore's green job bonanza - can we afford it?

fellow from the adam smith institute

in shock "jobs are bad, money matters more" article.

What a surprise. He obviously hasn't heard about the way unemployment is not equally distributed and new jobs can indeed be created that ends up employing some of that unemployed, directly or indirectly. Reference for instance the unemployed in Ohio.

Why, every time I read a science piece in the register that touches on the environment, do I get the impression the elreg is now a very right wing news site?

Climate change deniers

Are like racists and BNP supporters: they don't half love a comments page. Happily unrepresentative of the population, for all their persecution complex.

Of course...

We are all still paying off the "Red Menace" jobs bonanza, and the "Homeland Security" jobs bonanza is still keeping the credit card warm. Either the money moves around, or it doesnt. Its better if it moves around and the world has had good evidence of what happen when "prudent" investors become cautious and sit on their funds.

Governments are universally imprudent investors, but what they leave behind can be a legacy for the future. Whether it be highways or dams or irrigation systems. The Governments of the day never saw ROI, but the hit to the hip pocket largely trickled into the hip pockets of citizens encouraging business activity, employment, and private investment. The legacies left behind arent all bad either and, to be honest, if a government spending spree leaves in its wake a few renewable energy generators and some solid R&D, I would be much happier than if it left a half-built railgun or the waning memory of the spending spree a "give the cash back to the people" policy would presage.

Productivity of labour is the key point

Tim: "For, as I say, all those jobs, all those revenues, are properly counted as a cost of such schemes, not a benefit."

You are making the same error as the pollies by looking at the wrong statistic. The key classical economic concept at work here is the productivity of labour.

Via international treaty the cost of the carbon pollution externality is going to be added into the cost of production. That will cause the productivity of carbon-emitting industries to fall. In turn the wages they offer will fall relative to the remainder of the economy.

Or, taking the positive spin that pollies like, non-carbon-emitting industries will have increased productivity, causing he wages that offer to labour to increase.

Anyway, the result is an incentive for labour to move from one industry to another. Labeling these as "new" jobs is a tad rich, almost as rich as infrastructure developments claiming "new" job creation for the builders of those projects.

Note that this isn't zero-sum basket-weaving: the increased productivity in the new sector increases the national wealth (as long as you're comfortable with the idea that atmospheric carbon decreases the national wealth).

The problem with this classical economics approach is two-fold.

Firstly, the time lag between price signal and action are long in capital-intensive industries, usually around a decade but that may be much longer at this moment (approach a bank and want to borrow $2B, you've no hope at all during the current banking sector crisis). The cost of that lagged signal is large, as the externality is increasingly increasing in cost. This market failure obviously requires some government intervention for the solution with least cost to the nation to be found -- government doesn't require a functioning capital market to make an investment.

The second problem is that the cost of the externality is artificial. No one knows what the proper cost is until the effects of the cost can be measured. That is, until it is to late for any reasonable market-based corrective action. This leads to a lot more problems than usual with pollution pricing schemes: carbon pricing is very vulnerable to a simple denial that a problem exists (no effected people can yet be shown). Then there are all the usual problems with pollution pricing: such as how to distribute the pollution price (using it as government revenue isn't wise) and the incentive for avoidance of this artificial cost -- either by moving operations to another regulatory place or by extra-legal avoidance.

Getting back to Tim's quote. What the pollies should be touting is the increased wealth of the nation from the transfer of jobs from the less productive to the more productive industries. You could even state that number in job-equivalent units. The problem with economics is that we can't tell them what this number will be -- the situation is too complex to do anything other than give numbers at the boundaries (and they are frighteningly enough, to be honest).

Doomsday thinking

I simply don't buy into this modern doomsday type of thinking: renewable energy will wreck our economies and kill millions op people. Make that millions of innocent people.

From the American perspective, the Second World war was an enormous waste of money, never seen before and since. The proposed investments in green technology are nowhere near that. Did the Second World war wreck the US economy?

How much money was wasted on Ronald Reagan's 'Star Wars' pet project? Did it wreck the economy? Landing a man on the Moon?

I sick of all these pessimist fear mongers proclaiming green technology will mean the end of civilization.

@Marco

Yes, those things you mentioned are economy 101. The things I am talking about aren't taught at that level, stick with your studies a bit longer and you'll learn that terms like recession and such are relatively new terms that have little to do with underlying economic theory, that word in particular is a scare word that helps certain sectors of the financial/government power structure maintain control over the peasants.

Someday you will learn about how recession in a capitalist society is built to the system, and is a required component of a well balanced economy. Recession is one of the primary sources of the redistribution of wealth. Other than war it's probably the best way to correct system errors.

But I digress...

While I am most definitely ant-Al Gore, I am a firm believe in the overall goals of green living, if not for the environment, then for the sake of my wallet. Once we get over the initial hump of R&D and get into mass production, I believe the costs of perpetuating "green friendly fuels" will fall to a more practical amount.

However, one particular item that I strongly discourage and disagree with damn near everybody on are those stupid florescent light bulbs, that are designed to replace regular incandescent light bulbs.

They're junk. They don't last and it takes at least 5 to produce the same amount of light as one 100 watt bulb. Also, they contain mercury... Substituting something relatively useless and full of poison for something that drains off a little more energy?

Sorry folks, this is one area I refuse to compromise in. I will happily recycle, turn the thermostat down in the winter, and up in the summer... Heck, I'm even looking for vehicles that are much more fuel efficient. But I will NEVER have another one of those turd light bulbs in my house ever again.

Seriously

do you have to write notes to yourself reminding you how to get out of bed in the morning bws? You clearly know nothing about academia or about project funding.

@bws

You probably are quite happy with your half truth, but others are perhaps interested to know the other half of the truth. Which is: coal contains mercury. Using a conventional light bulbs releases around 5 times as much mercury into the envrionment because you use more energy. Myth busted.

My experience with the lifetime of bulbs is very good. They last forever. I bought a small 3 w bulb to serve as a night light for my son when he was a toddler. He's now 10 and since then the damn thing burnt all night every night. That's 7 * 365 * 10 hrs = 25.000+ hrs. My experience with the other bulbs is about the same, but not as impressive. Of course if you're a cheapskate (as you quite happily admit yourself) you're probably buying low quality crap.

Last time I checked...

There was a continent of unemployed Africans that would love to take on the jobs of our lowest paid workers.

The authors problem is he clearly doesn't understand the global economy and is suggesting that each nation is a closed system.

We've already moved our less interesting jobs off to China and India so that back here at home we can do more fun, interesting and better paid jobs. As China and India's economies improve they'll move the jobs down the chain to Africa whilst our old jobs continue over to China/India as we get the new latest and greatest jobs. Eventually machines just take over the roles when there's no need for human involvement anymore.

The key in creating "green jobs" is to ensure they really are green however, there's no point making new solar panels in Africa if it costs more in fossil fuels than you'll ever save by shipping them here, but this is why we also need infrastructure, if we can produce green transport such as maglev trains powered by nuclear power plants which despite the idiot force who don't understand the technology believing otherwise are actually extremely clean and providing they're purely civilian reactors using modern technology produce an entirely un-problematic amount of waste for disposable.

The green crusade is a good thing for everyone and Al Gore is a very bright person doing good work, it's just a shame the majority of the planet are actually stupid, the very first comment to this article demonstrates how scarily dumb some people on this planet actually are.

It's sad that now that Science has produced all the evidence and consensus anyone would ever need to prove global warming is happening, is a problem and is caused primarily by CO2 there are still some people refusing to believe it. It also comes as no surprise however seeing as billions of people also still believe the universe was made by a little magic man somewhere up the sky who controls everything ever.

Do you care more about yourself or other people?

Let's face it - most of the AGW denialists have basically never grown beyond the point at which they are so self-centered that they just want to be able to do whatever they want to do - irrespective of its impact on anyone else (most people grow beyond this stage when they leave their teens). As a result they just don't want to believe in AGW because it might mean they will have to modify their behaviour.

Essentially this is the Jeremy Clarkson syndrome, and there's no one more developmentally retarded than he is! If it were to come to a choice between Al Gore and Jeremy Clarkson, I know which one I'd trust my future to...

So what about this whole big thing of "the scientists are all in it together and they just want to perpetuate the AGW thing because they get their funding from it". Well so far I have seen lots of people make this tenuous claim as a potential motive, but that's all it is - a potential motive. That in itself doesn't even begin to make it true.

It MIGHT be true of some scientists, but no-one knows how many. I would hazard a guess that it's at best a pretty small percentage of them - having met some of them I know how genuine their view and concern is. It certainly can't be described as being ALL of them - that would be an unimaginably vast conspiracy and is just not credible, unless you really are a crazed conspiracist.

Come on now, let's just drop this one, shall we?

Global Warming isn't real

Of course it isn't - I'd have to make some minor changes to my lifestyle if it were so I'm going to say that all the scientists are liars and poopoo heads so I don't have to deal with it. Just like when they told me the earth was round.

Seriously, get a brain. GW happens. Climate change is here - ask any half decent scientist. Who has an axe to grind? The scientist who's looking at data or the big companies that make profit from causing the problem?

climate models

I will belive the current doomsday predictions when their computer models can actually model the past...once thats done then they can move on to the future, lets face it they have been wrong in the past (cough global cooling)...

Re: climate models

Well rejoice! because they do and have for years. That's what must be done for the model to be used to predict the likely future.

Al Gore

Some ten years ago Al Gore gave a speech. After the speech, when he thought (wrongly) that the microphones were switched off he remarked to a friend onstage " Well, if we did'nt have global warming we would have to think of something else."

This and his lifestyle certainly indicates a true believer! The problem is what it is that he is hiding behind the AGW front?

Dave.

Re Climate models

Yes, they have...and the best have been between 35-40% out.

Give you confidence???

Dave.

Creating jobs

The trick in creating jobs is to make people to pay for them. If you have no good incentive, people are going to keep their money. But if you say the world is gonna end otherwise, they'll shell out...

As it stands, I prefer it if we create jobs in a possibly unnecessary "green" industry than in fighting other countries...