So Bill Owens was Colorado’s first green governor. Who knew?
The revelation surfaced this week from a most unlikely source: a press release from our current governor, Bill Ritter — although Ritter’s publicity team did its best to obscure the neon punch line.
“Colorado is home to one of the largest and fastest growing pieces of America’s clean energy economy, according to a report released today by the Pew Charitable Trusts … ,” Ritter’s office declared. “The report found that jobs in the clean energy economy grew at a national rate of 9.1 percent, while traditional jobs grew by only 3.7 percent between 1998 and 2007. . . . In Colorado, clean energy jobs grew at a rate of 18.2 percent in the same time frame, while traditional jobs grew by 8.2 percent.”
Did they say 1998 to 2007? And who was governor then?
“Coloradans can be proud that our hard work has paid off,” said Ritter, who took office only in the last year covered by the Pew report, “creating thousands of clean energy jobs and attracting more than $600 million in venture capital in the past three years…”
The press release continues in this fashion, careful to never explicitly take credit for pre-2007 developments while repeatedly hinting at such a magical connection.
On one level, the governor’s zeal to associate himself with every job that could remotely be considered green, whatever its origins, is merely amusing. And it is particularly so in this case because the peak of Colorado’s green jobs during the period covered by Pew actually occurred in 2001 — six years before Ritter took office!
Did anyone on his staff examine the document?
Way back on page 52, a chart reveals that Colorado’s 17,008 jobs in the “Clean Energy Economy” in 2007 were actually eclipsed in 2001 with 17,218 such jobs. What do you know? Green jobs are subject to economic cycles, too — something you might not appreciate if you listened only to the rhetoric of the new-energy boosters regarding “sustainable” employment.
On a deeper level, such a single-minded infatuation with green jobs is worrisome to the extent that it downplays or ignores trade-offs in their pursuit. The Pew report itself is Exhibit One for this mindset: Not only is subsidizing green jobs good, the authors suggest, but subsidizing them more would be better and subsidizing them a whole lot more would be best of all.
The most productive use of capital is simply not part of the equation.
It is hardly surprising that when government force-feeds investment into certain industries, or tilts the playing field against their competitors, those industries will tend to grow faster than before. Whether total net employment will be any higher as a result is another matter; it could easily end up lower than it would have been.
The proposed cap-and-trade legislation in Congress, whose purpose is to boost the price of fossil fuels, is an example of this sort of tradeoff.
On the one hand, such a law would probably galvanize more investment in alternative energy and thus create more “green” jobs — and more opportunities for a governor to crow.
On the other hand, a cap-and-trade regime would eliminate an unknown number of jobs dependent on less expensive energy, while soaking up a portion of every household’s income.
Xcel Energy officials told me this week that their company is well positioned to cushion customers from too much rate shock from cap-and-trade — at least in the early years — because of investments it’s already making in alternative energy and in reducing demand.
For that matter, the bulk of carbon emission allowances (think of them as permits to release carbon dioxide) are likely to be allocated directly to utilities rather than auctioned off, as environmentalists would prefer.
Yet make no mistake, Xcel’s Frank Prager and Roy Palmer added. Rates will be affected by the legislation, especially as the program gathers steam.
I wonder if we’ll ever see any press releases from our elected officials regarding that little inconvenient truth.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
