Caulking Our Way to Economic Prosperity
Posted January 5th, 2009 at 12.14pm in Energy and Environment.
The Los Angeles Times has a brain dead article out today explaining Why Obama’s green jobs plan might work. It contains all the usual leftist green collar job lies and this little gem from green collar jobs activist Van Jones:
“You can employ a lot of people very quickly with off-the-shelf technology like caulk guns,” said Jones, founder of Green for All, an economic development group.” This isn’t George Jetson stuff.”
Color us skeptical on claims that our economy can be saved by paying millions of Americans to go around caulking every window site. We are more apt to believe President-elect Barack Obama’s new budget chief, Peter Orszag, who wrote a report last January saying that some forms of alternative-energy spending “are totally impractical” for stimulating the economy and others “could end up making the economic situation worse” by adding to the federal debt.
And don’t believe any figures anyone on the left throws out claiming to show how many green collar jobs federal government spending can create. The very woman who coined the term green collar jobs, Apollo Alliance co-director Kate Gordon, recently admitted to the Wall Street Journal that the job creation numbers her group throws out are “just to inspire people.”
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January 5, 2009 Kate Gordon, San Francisco, CA writes:
Dear Heritage Foundation,
Here is my response to the article entitled “Does Green Energy Add 5 Million Jobs? Potent Pitch, but Numbers Are Squishy.’ You will find that I was misquoted.
The Wall Street Journal, in an article about clean energy investments and green-collar jobs printed on November 7, 2008, incorrectly asserted that varying job creation estimates are “squishy.” I was surprised by a quote attributed to me that implied that Apollo’s five million job number is “just to inspire people.”
Well, the projection of five million green-collar jobs is accurate and inspiring. It is inspiring to think of a federal investment strategy that can catalyze the American economy by creating new demand for clean energy and energy efficiency systems. It is inspiring to think about the investments in job training to help scale up America’s workforce to prepare to make, install, and maintain these products. It is truly awe-inspiring to think of the millions of Americans that can be put to work all over this country, in a huge range of occupations, moving America toward a clean energy future.
But it is not just inspiring – it is accurate. In the New Apollo Program, we argue for a $50 billion investment program over ten years. It is an investment in all sectors of the American economy: from green construction to energy efficiency retrofits; from our transportation system to our power grid; from our existing factories to cutting-edge research, development and deployment opportunities. Based on a comprehensive study on a very similar set of proposals that was done for Apollo in 2004 by economist and Nobel laureate M. Ray Perryman, this level of federal investment will create or retain at least five million jobs in America. Most of these are on-site construction, manufacturing, and transportation jobs – jobs in industries that tend to pay a family-supporting wage and benefits, and that have anchored America’s middle class for generations.
Dr. Perryman’s data show also that the economic benefits of the Apollo investment strategy don’t stop at on-site jobs. These investments will create millions more jobs in associated industries, like the trucking companies moving the wind turbines, the lawyers and accountants helping broker deals between new clean energy businesses, or even the small restaurants and stores catering to the linemen and women upgrading the transmission grid in countless towns across the country.
Other studies, such as the “Green Recovery” paper recently released by the Center for American Progress, also include the positive economic impact created by, for instance, lower energy bills as a result of more clean energy options. Lower bills equal more money in consumers’ pockets, equal more spending in the local economy, equal more jobs. (See CAP’s response to the Wall Street Journal article here: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/11/sustainable_recovery.html)
These “indirect” jobs are included in President-elect Obama’s green jobs calculations, explaining why he comes to the five million job number with a lower initial investment. The different numbers are by no means “squishy.” They are the result of different initial assumptions, leading to different results.
Sincerely,
Kate Gordon
Co-director, Apollo Alliance