The Myth of Green Jobs
From Powerline. Just devastating. Here’s a sample:
The upshot? The Danes retain the title of world’s most prolific wind producer, and President Obama cites their experience as a path to be followed. The cost? Danish ratepayers are forced to pay the highest utility rates in Europe. And the American people are led to believe that, though wind may only provide a little more than one percent of our electricity now, reaching a 20 percent platform – as the Danes have allegedly done – will come at no cost, with no jobs lost and no externalities to consider.
Speaking of jobs, the report also pulls back the curtain on the wind power industry’s near-complete dependence on taxpayer subsidies to support the fairly modest workforce it presently maintains. Just as in Spain, where per-job taxpayer subsidies for so-called “green jobs” exceeds $1,000,000 per worker in some cases, wind-related jobs in Denmark on average are subsidized at a rate of 175 to 250 percent above the average pay per worker. All told, each new wind job created by the government costs Danish taxpayers between 600,000-900,000 krone a year, roughly equivalent to $90,000-$140,000 USD.
Remember that Denmark is a small country without mountains and cascading rivers for hydro electric, geo thermal, limited coal, oil or other means of cheaply providing electricity like some of their neighbors. Denmark’s only options for domestic controlled electricty production beyond some coal and natural gas are wind and nuclear (perhaps tidal but that has not really proven cost effective anywhere). Danes banned nuclear engery in 1985 (oops), but Danes also are part of the wider grids from Germany and Scandinavia so they do in fact get electricity from nuclear plants that way. Wind energy in Denmark is being done more out of necessity than economics(if only just to buffer them if engery prices go up).
I am all for wind production in the U.S., it is no panecea for electricity production but the more diversity on sources the better, and we can start with the Ted Kennedy Memorial wind farm in Nantucket Sound.
Oy, what is it about these people that always has to kill two birds with one stone? Inner-city unemployment. Green energy.
Ideological greed, I guess.
One bird, one stone, and even that’s a longshot.