Jobs and Green
From Thomas Friedman to John Edwards, we always hear about how many jobs will be created by a comprehensive green energy policy. This has always struck me as an absurd non sequiter — the purpose of environmental policy should be to reduce our carbon emissions(and/or achieve other environmental goals). End of story.
Of course, the reason Edwards, Friedman et al talk incessantly about jobs when discussing green policy is because they see it as a way to make environmentalism — which has typically been the provenance of the relatively wealthy — a more pressing issue for the least well off. For example, if you’re poor, do you really want to spend an extra 50 cents a gallon on gasoline so some yuppies can go glacier-hiking? And as a political strategy, the connection between jobs and the environment probably makes sense. But if we allow hazy projections about how many jobs said policy will create to permeate our discussions of various environmental policies, I’m pretty worried.
It logically follows that if we switch a certain percentage of our energy output to non-carbon, renewable or less carbon intensive sources, there will be a transfer of jobs — fewer employed in coal, more employed in wind, nuclear etc. If we move to using less energy, there should be fewer people employed in the energy sector, or at least I would hope so. Even under flawed analysis of how many jobs a renewable energy strategy would create, “accountants and bookkeepers” would get most of these new jobs. There are many benefits of a comprehensive government policy to increase usage of non-carbon intensive energy sources, but in so much as they promise a marked increase in the employment of “accountants and bookkeepers” that’s a sign of their inefficiency. Or as John Whitehead put it, “Jobs aren’t benefits of government policies unless there is some sort of failure in the labor markets.”
