From Ron Bailey at Reason Magazine, this piece dissects what “green jobs” (remember Van Jones?) has meant for Germany where it’s been tried.
Proponents of renewable energies often regard the requirement for more workers to produce a given amount of energy as a benefit, failing to recognize that this lowers the output potential of the economy and is hence counterproductive to net job creation. Significant research shows that initial employment benefits from renewable policies soon turn negative as additional costs are incurred. Trade and other assumptions in those studies claiming positive employment turn out to be unsupportable.
Well, Golly. That didn’t work out like it was supposed to, did it? Who knew that if you try to force decisions on the market that the market wouldn’t have made on its own, that there might be side effects?
Despite the fondest hopes of Kerry, Pelosi, Markey, and other Democrats in Congress, carbon rationing has not noticeably sparked a technological revolution in Europe yet. One might argue that a cleantech takeoff is just around the corner and that the energy revolution is just at the same stage as the Internet revolution was in 1991. Maybe. But the Internet analogy deployed by Kerry and co. misses the mark in another way—the Internet and cell phone boom took off as a result of deregulation and was largely financed by private capital. By contrast, the Capitol Hill denizens now haunting the Copenhagen conference imagine they can spark a similar technological revolution by passing a massive 1,400-page bill, laden with subsidies, tax breaks, and fine-grained regulations for all aspects of energy production.
Let me dispose one myth right here and now about the internet. The internet, as we know it, was not created by the government; US or otherwise. The DoD created an ad-hocish patchwork of military and academic minicomputers connected by an assortment of serial links of the sort that were leading-edge at the time of the creation. They were roughly like RS-232 links. Comparing that to today’s internet is like comparing a bicycle to a Saturn V rocket.
The internet didn’t really come into its own until the World Wide Web (WWW) was placed on top of it by the private sector. The infrastructure was in the hands of private telecommunications firms at that point. For practical intents and purposes, the government agencies that originally organized the internet had lost control of it a decade earlier.
There are many other examples floating the internet of government taking credit for what was substantially done by the private sector: the transistor, the integrated circuit, the jet airplane, even the original digital computer was a Navy project. So technology can’t possibly get out of the nest without a government incubator, right?
These examples all ignore the technologies that were launched with no government sponsorship; the television, the telephone and telegraph, electrical power, pretty much every of over 1000 inventions Edison patented. The point being, when the time is right, it will appear.
So what does this have to do with green jobs?
1. As the German study indicates, they displace other jobs.
2. If the technologies were ripe, they’d happen anyway.
3. If the technologies aren’t ripe, as is the case with most of this green tech, its a forced fit.
In other words, you can’t push on a rope. Central planning never worked when the Soviets tried it, and Obama isn’t magically more able than Stalin.
So, does this mean that we’re stuck with oil and oil ticks forever? No. Just as you can’t command technology, you also can’t anticipate it. When the worldwide price of oil stays high, because of new demand from the developing nations, the alternatives become more attractive. We can’t tell in advance what these alternatives will be, but what is as reliable as the sunrise is that the market will seek the optimum solution.
In other words, carbon caps will be superfluous when a better alternative comes along, and will be dangerous until then. Let me put it this way: ask yourself two questions. When has the market, absent some insider monkey business involving the government, failed? And, when has the government failed?
Which would you trust the earth to?
Tags: Green jobs
