“We’re the catalyst for a fundamental change,” Vice President Joe Biden told a Denver audience last week. “We’re giving people jobs in a tough economy.”
True enough on both counts, I suppose, except that the “we” in Biden’s self-congratulatory claim encompasses more than just the elected officials he imagines. The “we” who will finance these jobs includes, rather unjustly, today’s children as well as a generation still not born. They’ll be the taxpayers saddled with the debt created by Washington’s spending splurge.
Either that or the debt will be downsized through inflation, in which case the “we” will include thrifty Americans whose savings are devalued — pillaged, really — as a result.
If I were vice president, I’m not sure I’d be boasting about that.
Biden particularly touted a $500 million program to train public- housing residents to make homes more energy-efficient. At the same time last week, the president was extolling similar green jobs in his own appearances, claiming his stimulus package had “saved or created nearly 150,000 jobs,” including “jobs building solar panels and wind turbines; making homes and buildings more energy-efficient.”
Coloradans are of course familiar with this mantra about the importance of subsidizing green jobs and green industry, either at taxpayers’ or utility ratepayers’ expense. It’s not only the governor and his appointees who talk this way. I’ve heard state lawmakers praise green jobs for their alleged immunity to economic cycles and to outsourcing offshore.
The reality is more sobering. European countries have been pushing a green jobs agenda far longer than America. Matthew Kahn, professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, summarizes their record in the May/June issue of the centrist journal Foreign Policy. While “an optimist can certainly find success stories” in green job creation, Kahn concludes, there’s no doubt that the “subsidies are costly,” and that they not only “distort consumption and investment decisions” but result in “a less robust economy.”
“Denmark may be a clear success,” he writes, “but how many green failures have there been in Europe? Repackaging an old-fashioned industrial subsidy as a ‘green jobs’ stimulus may be not so much an environmental plan as a politically correct way for governments to transfer resources to a favored sector.”
If anything, Professor Kahn’s assessment may be overly generous. As a study released two months ago by the University of Rey Juan Carlos in Spain noted, that country’s unrivaled green agenda has created a “surprisingly low number of jobs, two-thirds of which came in construction, fabrication and installation . . . .” Worse, for every job created, 2.2 other jobs were destroyed, in part because “the high cost of electricity due to the green job policy tends to drive the relatively most energy-intensive companies and industries away.”
As for green jobs’ stability, just last month Vestas — the same wind-energy giant with operations in Colorado — announced it was closing Britain’s only wind turbine manufacturing plant.
The Economist magazine recently described our governor’s dream of making green jobs “the foundation of economic growth” as “chimerical.” Even if that’s too harsh, it’s clear that the vision is being shamelessly oversold.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
