Green Jobs Aren't Even Green

2% of all jobs are supposedly "Green Jobs." Which is a huge number, actually.

Could that possibly be right? Could so much of our economy actually depend on solar panels and wind-farms?

No.

Most jobs categorized are actually just... waste treatment and management jobs.

And the single biggest employer in the clean economy isn’t a sexy startup like First Solar, or even a giant like GE’s wind division. It’s the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, followed by the waste management and water treatment operations of the city of Los Angeles and New York. And waste management is followed by mass transit, which employs about 350,000 Americans. There are your most common clean workers: the garbage man and the bus driver.

Yeah, that'll pad the stats. But when Obama speaks of "investing in green jobs" he means "subsidizing 'green power' businesses," which is a tiny fraction of the small fraction of jobs which are designated "green."

Some questions for the President. Would be nice if we had a media interested in asking important questions.

How many “green jobs” need to be created over the next 14 months to fulfill your promise of lowering the unemployment rate to 5.5 percent by November 2012?

What qualifies you, or any other politician, to determine which jobs are worthy of creating?

What evidence do you have that government can create jobs for which there is little or no current market demand?

Oh, here's another question: Solyndra.

Okay, that's not in the form of a question. How about "Discuss the stuttering cluster***k of a miserable failure in losing $535 million (over a half billion) in federal loans to a political donor's nothing-but-subsidies fake 'business.'"

I'd sure like to read Solyndra's applications for those loans. I'd like to see their assertions that they predicted, honestly, that they believed their business model would bring them into the black in a short number of years.

posted by Ace at 02:58 PM

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