"GREEN" JOBS ARE REALLY ABOUT GET RICH QUICK

Barack Obama spends plenty of time promoting "green" jobs as the center of the "new" economy going forward. In particular, he likes to cite socialist Spain as a nation that leads the world toward the Utopian "green" future.

As is often the case with leftist causes, reality trumps idealism once again as the article below explains. Most notably, it cites a report from Spanish university researchers that leads to conclusions which are the polar opposite of the Obama campaign and governing twaddle.

The painful facts are twofold. For every "green" job created in Spain, 2.2 jobs are lost to the Spanish economy. In other words, this supposedly beneficial revolution of the future is putting everyday working families out of work by eliminating their jobs.

Secondly, all energy consumers are now forced to pay higher prices for their energy usage. Thus on the one hand the family bread winner can lose their job while on the other hand, family energy bills skyrocket.

This is typical of leftist Utopian ideology. Sounds good, seems like a good idea on paper but leads to devastating outcomes for most people. It makes leftists feel better about themselves but it leads to pain for the masses.

There are a few winners in this formula however. Those organizations and individuals who could get at the front of the line for the government subsidized "green" revolution giveaways got rich quick. As they took the taxpayers money to the bank, they helped lead the nation to economic chaos.

Utopians like Obama lack common sense. They thrive on ideology but cannot grasp reality. Their doctrine has never worked over time anywhere in history. Yet they proceed on their merry way as if, for some unknown magical reason, they know better than the fools who have proceeded them down the same path.

American voted for change. We got instead the tried, tested and failed Utopian ideology of history.

Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne!


Green Joblessness
Spain shows the follow of eco-employment policies.

To little fanfare this month, BP closed a solar-cell factory in Madrid, laying off 480 workers. But wait, aren't "green-collar" jobs the wave of the future -- the kind of employment that will only grow and "can't be outsourced," as President Obama likes to say?
Spain happens to be the country that the President often cites as his role model for the Green Jobs Revolution. It's also the source of an important new study that explains how expensive these jobs are -- and why Spain's renewable-energy business is a bubble waiting to burst. The study, released last month by researchers at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, uses data from the Spanish government and European Union to demonstrate that each job created in Spain's renewables industry costs as much as 2.2 jobs elsewhere in the economy.
The study's authors calculate that jobs in Spain's solar, wind and hydroelectric power industries were subsidized to the tune of more than €570,000 apiece from 2000 to 2008 -- a total exceeding €28.6 billion. And that figure only includes the extra cost to energy consumers of being forced by the government to buy renewable energy at prices several times higher than market rates for conventional power. The authors didn't calculate direct subsidies, such as grants to build solar farms, because the government doesn't even know how much money it has handed out to the renewables industry. But the direct-subsidies tally is at least €1.1 billion.
Some commentators have reported that Spain has lost 2.2 jobs for each job created by solar, wind or hydroelectric power producers. But the study instead is talking about opportunity cost -- the jobs that weren't created because resources were used inefficiently, or what the French economist Frédéric Bastiat meant by "what is seen and what is not seen."
Yet these "lost" jobs have a real impact, particularly when employment rolls are shrinking elsewhere. They're also politically pernicious, in that it's easier to point to a new green-collar worker than to the two or three people who remain unemployed because other jobs were crowded out.
What hasn't been reported in much detail from the Juan Carlos study is the way Spanish renewable-energy policy created an enormous investment bubble that may already be bursting. In many ways, this is the most important element of the report.
Since 2004, Spain's Socialist government has essentially guaranteed a huge return on any investment in solar, wind or hydro. It's done so by requiring electricity distributors to buy all renewable energy produced in the country, at prices that at times have been 10 times higher than market rates. This is known as a "feed-in price," and it has cost Spanish energy customers an extra €28.6 billion this decade.
Initially, the government set a regulated price for solar power of 575% of market rates for small producers and "only" 300% for larger ones. The result was a series of inefficient solar farms small enough to get the higher subsidy but often owned by the same companies. And not just by power companies: "builders, real estate companies, hotel groups and even truck manufacturers" got in on the action.
In 2007 the government finally tweaked the subsidy schedule to level the playing field for larger solar producers. Yet within four months, regulators realized that the mandated prices were still so generous that 85% of all solar-powered generating capacity due by 2010 was already in place. To rein in the market, Madrid passed still another law that sharply reduced incentives to build new solar capacity.
Firms had one year to get in under the old system, and, boy, did they work overtime to make it: Government data indicate that 83% of Spain's solar capacity was installed in those 12 months. That jump came after solar capacity had already grown by 118% in 2005, 308% in 2006, and 458% in 2007. In all, solar-power capacity in Spain grew by more than 20,000% from 2004 to 2008, a rate surpassed perhaps only by Zimbabwe's inflation.
If that's not a bubble, we don't know what is. And while it will be a few months longer before the effects of the new, stricter solar regime can be measured, it's not hard to predict sluggishness -- if not an outright bust.
Madrid's chosen method of curtailing solar-power growth is to set a quota for new installations, one that equals about 15% of the growth seen in 2008. That means the jolly green job fairy will soon be leaving: Two-thirds of the roughly 50,000 jobs created in renewables have been in construction, manufacturing and installation -- exactly the kind of growth that couldn't be maintained, and which Madrid is explicitly trying to curb now. Trade unions say the new law has already led to 15,000 solar job losses in just a few months -- and that was before the 480 that BP cut.
Some people might be tempted to conclude from Spain's experience that renewable-energy policies must simply be drawn up more tightly to avoid this kind of boom and bust. They'd be wrong.
Spanish policy shows that green dreams like renewable energy are achievable only through massive transfers of money from productive sectors to those seeking to get rich quick thanks to government mandates. And that the few jobs created greatly depend on maintaining impossible levels of growth. Even in Mr. Obama's Washington, you can't print enough greenbacks to pay for these green jobs.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc

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