With the spectacular failure of Solyndra, a company described by The Washington Post as “a showcase for the Obama administration’s effort to create jobs in clean technology,” isn’t it finally time for the prophets of the New Energy Economy to take a breather and reassess their gospel?
With even The New York Times concluding “the green economy is not proving to be the job-creation engine that many politicians envisioned” and dubbing President Obama’s pledge to create 5 million green jobs over 10 years a “pipe dream,” wouldn’t it be wise for the gurus of green to adopt a more nuanced message?
Of course it would, but they won’t. They have too much riding on their exaggerated claims.
Take former Gov. Bill Ritter, who in a debate this year in New York defended the jaw-dropping proposition that “Clean energy can drive America’s economic recovery” — only to have his clock cleaned by opponents, according to an audience vote. Ritter’s $300,000 post at Colorado State University exists for no other reason than to promote the green-jobs-are-our-salvation fable. At least the university doesn’t bill him as a scholar; he’s a professional advocate.
Yes, clean energy will play a growing role in our economy, and would to some degree even without the breathtaking subsidies being shoveled its way (Solyndra’s failure could leave taxpayers on the hook for nearly half-a-billion dollars). But context is crucial.
In a recent study titled “Sizing the Clean Economy: A National and Regional Green Jobs Assessment” by the Brookings Institution and Battelle Technology Partnership Practice, the authors celebrate the fact that industries such as “wind energy, solar PV, and smart grid” are “expanding rapidly at a time of sluggish national growth.”
And so they are. But they are minnows in the economic ocean, and small fry even within the 2.7 million clean- economy jobs the study identifies. As Time magazine explained in dissecting Brookings’ data, “The most common green job? Try waste management and treatment, which employs nearly 400,000 workers — 14 percent of all green jobs. And the single biggest employer in the clean economy . . . [is] the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation . . . . And waste management is followed by mass transit, which employs about 350,000 Americans. There are your most common clean workers: the garbage man and the bus driver.”
Isn’t it a tad misleading to include bus drivers, sanitation workers, insulation installers and a variety of other jobs that have been around for decades as part of a new, clean economy? If you don’t, however, you’re left with the dispiriting fact that truly nascent industries such as solar and wind, while growing briskly, barely made a dent in offsetting overall job losses.
The growth of solar and wind “seems pretty explosive,” writes Curtis Brainard of Columbia Journalism Review, “until you consider that those rates translated to the creation of only 40,000 jobs over seven years.”
Worse yet, many of those jobs depend on government subsidies that will be hard to sustain.
“After years of staggering growth, the clean-energy industry is headed for a crisis . . .,” predict David G. Victor and Kassia Yanosek in this summer’s issue of Foreign Affairs. “The root cause of today’s troubles is a boom-and-bust cycle of policies that have encouraged investors to flock to clean-energy projects that are quick and easy to build rather than invest in more innovative technologies that could stand a better chance of competing with conventional energy sources over the long haul. Indeed, nearly seven-eighths of all clean-energy investment worldwide now goes to deploying existing technologies, most of which are not competitive without the help of government subsidies.”
We’d get more bang for our buck by doubling investment on innovation and slashing the seven-eighths spent on everything else. But given the weight of the hogs camped at the public trough, that prospect hardly seems likely.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
