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Posts Tagged ‘Green jobs’

Dig, baby, dig!

by 1389AD ( 68 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Business, China, Economy, Regulation, taxation, Transportation at March 14th, 2012 - 11:30 am

What on earth are we doing?

Smiley digging a hole
What we should
do instead

For over two decades, US government regulatory and tax policy have effectively shut down both mining and manufacturing on US soil, so that US companies cannot make a profit unless they outsource and offshore more and more of their operations. Thus, we have foolishly let ourselves become dependent on strategic rare earth minerals imported from China. We have been squandering our declining tax revenues on the “green industry” stimulus boondoggle, whose payback thus far has been negative. We have been making up the revenue shortfall by borrowing ever-growing sums of money from the Chinese. As Mark Steyn points out, the US owes not only more than it can pay back, it owes more than the entire planet can pay back. When the Chinese government puts a cap on rare earth mineral exports, the Obama Administration decides it’s time to put pressure on China, not that we are in much of a position to do so.

I am not the only one who sees a problem with that.

From the 1389 Blog Mailbox:

Dear 1389,

Since you occasionally cover resource-related and regulatory issues on your blog and recently covered one of our key issues, I thought your readers might appreciate some insight into the nightmare that is the U.S. permitting process for mining projects, to which Dan McGroarty alludes in his latest column for RealClearWorld.

How does the Jason Bourne reference fit in? In The Bourne Dominion, the latest installment of the book series, terrorists set out to destroy the only rare earths mine in the United States. If successful, China would be able to extend its dominion over resources critical to everything from wind power and electric car batteries to U.S. advanced weapons systems. Enter Jason Bourne to avert this threat.

McGroarty’s point is that in spite of an overall well-thought out scenario, this plot “simply isn’t credible,” as it’s far simpler to derail a major U.S. mining project:

[A]ny group opposed to U.S. interests would simply need an anti-mining activist, a Wi-Fi connection and the email addresses of a few federal, state and local bureaucrats. A thousand Jason Bournes with arms-linked around the mine pit would be no match for a well-aimed question about an errant comma on page 15 of Appendix D-3 of any one of the scores of permitting documents required to bring a modern mine online in the U.S. today.

Indeed, as we have regularly pointed out on our blog, the United States has the “dubious honor of being tied with Papua New Guinea for having the lengthiest permitting process of the 25 major mining nations,” according to the authoritative Behre Dolbear “Country Rankings for Mining Investment” report, also dubbed “Where not to Invest.” McGroarty’s conclusion is sobering:

In our world, as in Bourne’s, other countries step in to seize advantage when and where they can.

Unless we streamline a process perennially judged to be the mining world’s worst, the U.S. will be begging or buying critical metals of all kinds from whatever countries continue to mine them, using whatever standards – or lack thereof – to pull them out of the ground.

A book in which policymakers in Washington take on the U.S. mining permitting process, and make it more competitive without sacrificing necessary standards would likely collect dust on the shelves, and never make it to Hollywood. However, we’d all benefit from a plot like that.

Please help us spread the word by sharing this important issue with your readers, and feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.

Thank you, and best regards,

Sandra Wirtz
Director of Research & Staff Blogger
swirtz@americanresources.org
American Resources Policy Network

Fox News: Obama administration seeks to pressure China on exports with new trade case

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration is bringing a new trade case against China that seeks to pressure Beijing to end export restrictions on key materials used to manufacture hybrid car batteries, flat-screen televisions and other high-tech goods.

The latest action, announced Tuesday, is part of President Barack Obama’s broader effort to crack down on what his administration sees as unfair trading practices by a rising economic power that have put American companies at a competitive disadvantage.

The U.S. asked the World Trade Organization to facilitate talks with China over its curtailment of exports of rare earth minerals. The U.S. is bringing the case to the WTO along with the European Union and Japan.

In Brussels, EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht said China’s restrictions “hurt our producers and consumers in the EU and across the world.”
[…]
China has a stranglehold on the global supply of 17 rare earth minerals that are essential for making high-tech goods, including hybrid cars, weapons, flat-screen TVs, mobile phones, mercury-vapor lights, smartphones and camera lenses. The materials also are used in the manufacture of tiny motors, such as those used to raise and lower car windows and in consumer electronics.

China has reduced its export quotas of these rare earth minerals over the past several years to cope with growing demand at home, though Chinese officials also cite environmental concerns as the reason for the restrictions. U.S. industry officials suggest it is an unfair trade practice, against rules established by the WTO, a group that includes China as a member.

Administration officials said Beijing’s export restrictions give Chinese companies a competitive advantage by providing them access to more of these rare materials at a cheaper price, while forcing U.S. companies to manage with a smaller, more costly supply.
[…]
On Tuesday, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman defended Beijing’s curbs on rare earth production as necessary to limit environmental damage and conserve scarce resources.

“We think the policy is in line with WTO rules,” said the spokesman, Liu Weimin, at a regular briefing.

He rejected complaints that China is limiting exports. “Exports have been stable. China will continue to export, and will manage rare earths based on WTO rules,” Liu said.

The spokesman noted that China has about 35 percent of rare earth deposits but accounts for more than 90 percent of global production. “China hopes other countries can shoulder responsibility for supplies and can find alternative resources,” he said.

Rare earth minerals are scattered throughout the Earth’s crust, but only in small quantities, making them hard to mine. However, rich deposits of these rare earth oxides are in China, giving it command of the market.

The U.S. has just one rare earth mining company, the Colorado-based Molycorp Inc. There are also working mines in Australia, and a proposed one in Malaysia.
[…]
The president used an executive order last month to create a new trade enforcement agency — the Interagency Trade Enforcement Center — to move aggressively against China and other nations. In announcing the new agency, Obama said it would bring “the full resources of the federal government to bear” in order to level the playing field for U.S. workers.
[…]
Under the terms of the WTO complaint, China has 10 days to respond and must hold talks with the U.S., E.U. and Japan within 60 days. If an agreement cannot be reached within that time frame, the U.S. and its partners could request a formal WTO panel to investigate Chinese practices.

More here.

Click here to watch the Obama/WTO statement on Fox News.

 

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Posted in Barack Obama, Business, China, Economy, Regulation, taxation, Transportation | 68 Comments »

Tilting at Renewable Energy Windmills

by huckfunn ( 74 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Climate, Democratic Party, Economy, Environmentalism, government, Progressives, Spain, Technology at May 11th, 2011 - 8:30 am



One of the main goals set forth in Obama’s 2011 SOTU address was the implementation of clean energy. “So tonight, I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: by 2035, 80% of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources”.  Let’s take a look at what the “green energy” initiative has done for Spain.

Spain’s Solar Deals on Edge of Bankruptcy as Subsidies Founder

German Vilimelis heard about Spain’s solar gold rush from his brother-in-law in 2007.Across the plains around Lerida, the northeastern Spanish town where they spent weekends, farmers were turning over their fields to photovoltaic panels to capitalize on government solar- energy subsidies. Vilimelis persuaded his father, Jaume, who made a living growing pears on 5 acres (2 hectares) of land in Lerida, to turn over a portion of his farm for the project, Bloomberg Markets reported in its November issue.

Vilimelis, 35, a procurement manager for a consumer goods company, pooled his family savings and mortgaged his apartment to obtain a loan of more than 400,000 euros ($558,500) to cover the investment. Within nine months, the family’s 80-kilowatt generation unit — 500 solar panels on seven racks angled toward the sun — was feeding power into the national grid.

Solar investors such as Vilimelis were lured by a 2007 law passed by the government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero that guaranteed producers a so-called solar tariff of as much as 44 cents per kilowatt-hour for their electricity for 25 years — more than 10 times the 2007 average wholesale price of about 4 cents per kilowatt-hour paid to mainstream energy suppliers.

Thanks to the incentives, the family met the monthly cost of the loan and even earned a small profit. Once the debt was paid off in 2018, Vilimelis looked forward to making even more money during the 15 additional years of subsidies guaranteed under Spanish law.

Now Vilimelis and more than 50,000 other Spanish solar entrepreneurs face financial disaster as the policy makers contemplate cutting the price guarantees that attracted their investment in the first place.

“You feel cheated,” he says. “We put our money in on the basis of a law.”

Zapatero introduced the subsidies three years ago as part of an effort to cut his country’s dependence on fossil fuels. At the time, he promised that the investment in renewable energy would create manufacturing jobs and that Spain could sell its panels to nations seeking to reduce carbon emissions.

Yet by failing to control the program’s cost, Zapatero saddled Spain with at least 126 billion euros of obligations to renewable-energy investors. The spending didn’t achieve the government’s aim of creating green jobs, because Spanish investors imported most of their panels from overseas when domestic manufacturers couldn’t meet short-term demand.

So where are all of the “green jobs” that the renewable energy boom were supposed to create?

Look at Spain, Green Employment is Red.

By 2005, growth rates of installed solar and wind capacity in Spain were among the highest in the world. Now, however, the tariff deficit has reached an estimated $26 billion while economic recession has lowered tax receipts and threatened overall fiscal health. In 2009, Spain’s public-sector debt rose to 53.2% of gross domestic product from 39.8% in 2008. The maximum specified for euro-zone countries is 60%.

• For every green job financed by Spanish taxpayers, 2.2 jobs were lost as an opportunity cost.

• Only 1 of 10 green job contracts were in maintenance and operation of installed plants; the rest were working positions sustainable only in an expansive environment related to high subsidies.

• Since 2000, Spain had committed $753,778 for each green job.

• Those programs resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,500 jobs.

• Each green megawatt installed destroyed 5.39 jobs elsewhere in the economy.

A report recently released by Stuart Young Consulting and The John Muir Trust in the UK is highly skeptical of the economic feasibility of wind generated electric power based upon a study of UK wind farms. Among the findings:

  • On 124 separate occasions from November 2008 to December 2010, the total generation from the windfarms metered by National Grid was less than 20MW (a fraction of the 450MW expected from a capacity in excess of 1600MW+). These periods of low wind lasted an average of 4.5 hours.
  • Actually, low wind occurred every six days throughout the 26-month study period. The report finds that the average frequency and duration of a low wind event of 20MW or less between November 2008 and December 2010 was once every 6.38 days for a period of 4.93 hours.
  • At each of the four highest peak demand points of 2010, wind output was extremely low at 4.72%, 5.51%, 2.59% and 2.51% of capacity at peak demand.
  • In fact, the average output from wind was 27.18% of metered capacity in 2009, 21.14% in 2010, and 24.08% between November 2008 and December 2010 inclusive.
  • below 20% of capacity more than half the time
  • below 10% of capacity over one third of the time
  • below 2.5% capacity for the equivalent of one day in twelve
  • below 1.25% capacity for the equivalent of just under one day a month

Read the whole report here. (Hat Tip Yenta Fada)

Much of the renewable energy initiative has already proven to be a failure and the O-Regime certainly knows this. As with most of their policies, the renewable energy scam is about limiting our freedom of choice, wealth re-distribution and controlling every aspect of our lives.

Rodan Note: These Green policies have led to 22% Unemployment in Spain. Currently the Rightwing Popular Party is ahead in the polls for the 2012 elections. This has led Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero to announced he will not seek re-election. His Green jobs focus has failed!

 

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Posted in Barack Obama, Climate, Democratic Party, Economy, Environmentalism, government, Progressives, Spain, Technology | 74 Comments »

The Green Jobs Con: Big Left Behind Big Wind And Vice Versa

by snork ( 102 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Climate, Technology at March 4th, 2010 - 8:30 am

At the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Chris Horner has been asking questions. At PJM, he finds that despite the bubbly bull**** about how green jobs are going to be a competitive advantage, the actual experience is quite to the contrary.

After two studies refuted President Barack Obama’s assertions regarding the success of Spain’s and Denmark’s wind energy programs, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request reveals the Department of Energy turned to George Soros and to wind industry lobbyists to attack the studies.

Via the FOIA request, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has learned that the Department of Energy — specifically the office headed by Al Gore’s company’s former CEO, Cathy Zoi — turned to George Soros’ Center for American Progress and other wind industry lobbyists to help push Obama’s wind energy proposals.

So the government is using wind industry lobbyists and Soros front groups as scientific and economic experts. Now why do you suppose George Soros is involved in this? And what exactly is the experience in Spain and Denmark?

Some European economists took a look. In March, a research team from Madrid’s King Juan Carlos University produced a detailed, substantive, heavily sourced, two-method paper: “Study of the Effects on Employment of Public Aid to Renewable Energy Sources.” The paper concluded that Spain’s “green jobs” program was an economic failure, in fact costing Spain many jobs.

The president of Spain’s renewable energy association — along with a Communist Party affiliated trade federation — decried the paper’s lead author as being unpatriotic.

The former wrote in Spain’s leading paper, El Mundo, slamming the research paper. However, he did not critique the paper itself — he agreed with its conclusion. He was furious only that the study was publicized. By revealing the truth about Spain’s increasingly mythologized “green jobs” and renewable energy experience, the revealed study threatened the prospects for Spain’s companies to be bailed out by the U.S. repeating these mistakes.

Oh, dear. We can’t have such inconvenient truths coming out, now can we? Meanwhile, back in the US:

Back in the U.S., the American Wind Energy Association — the lobby for “Big Wind” in Washington, D.C., which includes a few Spanish wind giants — also attacked the publication of the Spanish paper.

Soon, the Obama administration published a five-page talking points memo assailing the economic assessment — written by two young, non-economist, pro-wind activists from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Boulder, Colorado.

NREL is an extension of the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). EERE is run by Assistant Secretary of Energy Cathy Zoi, who, until assuming this post, served as CEO to Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection. Zoi is responsible for many millions of the “green jobs” stimulus dollars pushed for and designed by Van Jones (this according to Jones himself).

Where have we heard that name before? Something about crackpot 9/11 conspiracy theories? Well lo and behold! Also from PJM, it seems that he’s such a brilliant intellectual, Princeton University is so delighted to have him, they could just ejaculate. Richard Feynman just rolled over in his grave (but I’m sure Woodrow Wilson is getting a boner in his grave):

He’s back. In fact, he never went away. The Center for American Progress, John Podesta’s left/liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., announced that Van Jones has been appointed Senior Fellow working on Green policy initiatives. And then Princeton University announced that Jones has been appointed as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, as well as the Center for African-American Studies.  Jones has scored a “two-fer,” two appointments — two big salaries — all because of his outspoken left-wing views, and the notoriety he obtained largely due to Glenn Beck’s expose of his background before he was appointed to his former White House job as Obama’s Green Czar.  No wonder Jones keeps thanking Beck!

The world has gone mad.

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Posted in Barack Obama, Climate, Technology | 102 Comments »

Green Jobs, and Other Fairy Tales

by snork ( 101 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Climate, Economy, Progressives, Science, Technology at December 20th, 2009 - 5:00 am

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?

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Posted in Barack Obama, Climate, Economy, Progressives, Science, Technology | 101 Comments »