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$500,000 of Green for Green Jobs, Red for the Rest of Us

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  August 23rd, 2011 at 02:02 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

It certainly pays to go green.  Well, at least until the greenbacks stop flowing – and bankruptcy kicks in.

Last year, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner estimated that the $30 billion green handout in the stimulus bill cost taxpayers roughly $475,000 per job created.  According to the Wall Street Journal, that’s quadruple the cost of creating a job in a nonsubsidized private firm.  It turns out that Horner was right on the money, even for non-energy related “green” jobs.

Yesterday, Fox News reported on the results of a tree planting stimulus program in Nevada – and it’s not pretty:

In 2009, the U.S. Forest Service awarded $490,000 of stimulus money to Nevada’s Clark County Urban Forestry Revitalization Project, aimed at revitalizing urban neighborhoods in the county with trees, plants, and green-industry training.

According to Recovery.gov, the U.S. government’s official website related to Recovery Act spending, the project created 1.72 permanent jobs.  In addition, the Nevada state Division of Forestry reported the federal grant generated one full-time temporary job and 11 short-term project-oriented jobs.

Supporters of the program claim that there was an unspecified amount of jobs created from “Spanish-language training for Hispanics in the landscaping and tree care industry.”  After all, these are probably jobs that Americans won’t do anyway.

To be fair, at least tree planting won’t go out of business, thereby providing these 1.75 individuals with permanent jobs.  The same cannot be said for stimulus-subsidized Big Solar jobs.

Last week, the Massachusetts-based Evergreen Solar filed for bankruptcy, after laying off 800 workers in March.   Now, they are slated to dump another 65 workers by closing a plant in Michigan.  This, after receiving an undisclosed amount of stimulus cash, in addition to $58 million in state aid.

So much for Obama’s 2008 promise to create 5 million well-paying green jobs!

While Obama’s corporate cronies are seeing green, we are all incurring red.  Obama’s stimulus helped contribute to his $4.247 trillion addition to the national debt.  Following the latest $2.5 trillion increase in the debt ceiling, the debt has already increased by $345 billion, from $14.294 trillion to $14.639 trillion.

Let’s put that figure in perspective for a moment.  As part of the deal to increase the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion, Congress agreed to cut spending by $6.67 billion next year.  Well, at a clip of $3 million per minute, we blew through that amount of savings in the first 37 hours of the new borrowing regime!

I’ve always viewed environmentalists as watermelons; green on the outside, but ruby red on the inside.  I guess you can view the red as the embodiment of socialism or perennial debt.

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  • johnt

    Is it possible that some of these cases involve Democratic supporters? And that apart from who immediately makes out, I couldn’t bring myself to say, profit, how much finds it’s way back to the DNC and other similar low life operations?
    Ah, Progressivism, moving the country forward.

  • YnotNOW

    Government subsidy ignores the basic laws of supply and demand. In that, the only way a job can be long-term, is if the worker produces more than he is paid. Value for value. If a job relies on government subsidy to start, then it is by definition a job that produces less than you pay for it. Which makes us all poorer – paying too much in to get too little value in return.

    Green is just the placebo de-jure to justify boondoggles.

  • toothpick

    Daniel,

    In your posting you offer the following observation: “To be fair, at least tree planting won?t go out of business, thereby providing these 1.75 individuals with permanent jobs.”

    This is an invalid way to look at it. A “permanent” job is one that produces goods or services of value that someone is willing to pay for on an ongoing basis. The only entity that will pay for tree planting in this context is the government. Thus the only sense in which this position is “permanent” is if a permanent (meaning, repeating) source of funding is established by the government.

    In other words, we’d have to convert the one-time stimulus make-work expense into an ongoing part of the baseline budget in order to make this a “permanent” job.

    I think you have conflated a value judgement on tree-planting with an economic assessment of same. Tree-planting may never go out of style but it is neither self-funding nor profitable.

  • hotnike

    With some 275+ repubs in Congress with nothing to do, you would think there would be at least one that would audit the stimulus spending. My Minnesota rep. from my district, Erik Paulsen, spends his time reading to elementary school students .Come on Erik, do something to reign in the spending.

  • RDCook

    So how do we identify just what is a ?renewable/green? source of energy? I have come up with a common sense set of criteria.
    First the source has to produce more energy than it takes to operate and maintain whatever system is being evaluated. Secondly it must produce enough energy to completely replicate itself entirely when it wears out and have energy left over to use. Take for example a wind generator. If it was truly renewable it would produce enough energy to cover every step from mining of the raw materials to construct its components, site acquisition, site preparation, the manufacture of every one of its components, on site construction of the tower and generator, maintenance, the distribution infrastructure, eventual replacement of itself and still have energy left over to use for other purposes. The same would apply for ?renewable? solar, hydro, geothermal and biomass.
    The energy return on energy invested (EROEI) should be the deciding factor when choosing energy sources. If the EROEI is 1:1 it means that equal amounts of energy were used to produce the commodity as were realized when it was used. In this case the commodity would be worthless as a viable energy source. An argument occurs when trying to determine what should be included in the energy invested portion of the ratio. Some the investments are included in the previous paragraph. Proponents of so called ?renewable? energy sources purposely exclude much of the energy invested side of the equation to make their renewable sources seem economically viable.
    If in the long run the energy return is not significantly larger than the energy invested; artificially driving up the cost of traditional energy sources will result in economic suicide.