The myth (and phony math) of 'green' jobs -- by Duggan Flanakin of CFACT

Governments are killing real jobs and conning us about ‘millions of good green jobs’

 
“Fool me once,” Stephen King wrote, “shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us.” His adage certainly applies to the myth (and fake math) of green jobs.
 
During the 2020 election campaign, Joe Biden asserted that more than 3 million Americans are already “employed in the clean energy economy.” He then boasted that, “if executed strategically, our response to climate change can create more than 10 million well-paying jobs in the United States that will grow a stronger, more inclusive middle class … and not just in cities along the coasts.”
 
That would make Joe twice as boastful as his former boss, who promised the 2009 $787 billion stimulus package would create “over five million” green jobs. Four years later, the Brookings Institution reported that, “of the nearly 2.7 million ‘green jobs’ [the Obama-Biden Administration] identifies, most were bus drivers, sewage workers and other types of work that don’t fit the ‘green jobs of the future’” description.
 
Energy analyst David Blackmon later reported that Obama’s own Department of Labor acknowledged the initial failure to launch. DOL’s September 2011 report, “Recovery Act: Slow pace placing workers into jobs jeopardizes employment goals of the Green Jobs Program,” noted that only a third of the allocated funding had been spent; a fifth of the “degrees” and “certifications” went to people with a single day of training; and half of the “graduates” had five or fewer days of training. Just 2% of program participants held their jobs for at least six months.
 
The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted oil industry lobbyists as holding “green” jobs! The septic tank and portable toilet servicing industry had 33 times more “green” jobs than solar electric utilities. The BLS had to admit in a June 2012 report, “Green Technologies and Practices – August 2011,” that they could identify only 854,700 “green” jobs, including janitors and cleaners.
 
What a sham! Shame on them for trying to con us.
 
David Kreutzer pointed out in a Heritage Foundation report that steel workers had the most “green” industrial jobs. Why? Most U.S. steel is recycled scrap, and some steel gets used in making wind turbines. The next largest groups were bus drivers, waste collectors and used-merchandise store employees – followed finally by engineering and architectural services. The much hated nuclear industry accounted for over 80% of the 44,000 “green” electric utility jobs. There were five times as many “green” jobs in social advocacy (environmentalist group lobbyists) as in renewable electric power.
 
Ah, but that was then – and this is now, you say. Right.  
 
In January, the Associated Press reported on “Biden’s fuzzy math” regarding his claim of creating 1 million new auto industry jobs – even if he actually replaces the 650,000-government vehicle fleet with electric cars and installs 500,000 new EV charging stations – all at taxpayer expense. Theoretically, a huge government buying program will lower EV costs, and the myriad of charging stations will lessen fears of being stuck in a hurricane evacuation in a vehicle you cannot quickly gas up. Theoretically.
 
But hold on! Every electric vehicle job will likely come at the expense of a gasoline-engine vehicle job, and every EV charging station will diminish jobs in pipeline, refining, gasoline retail, gasoline delivery, and other sectors. The AP story adds that industry analysts and the United Auto Workers union agree that EV manufacturing will likely mean fewer automotive jobs. One reason is that EVs have far fewer parts and are simpler to build, thus require fewer workers, and often just need a new $6,000 battery module. Another is that battery manufacturing is easily automated. But that is hardly the whole story.
 
Back in 2019, while losing over a fifth of its U.S. market share of sales over a 3-year period, General Motors admitted it already employed more non-union auto workers in China than union workers in the USA. The harsh reality is that there are 10 times more electric vehicle battery manufacturing facilities in Asia than in all of North America. Maybe Jinping Joe Biden is talking about the number of Chinese “green” jobs. Especially child and near-slave labor in China’s mines and processing plants.
 
Other fact checkers have also found Biden Administration green jobs claims are “mostly false.”
 
Electric vehicles are just part of the Green New Biden Deal. Surrendering our economy to the Paris climate accords and its draconian environmental restraints is another. Abandoning oil, gas and coal – and very likely nuclear energy – and all the jobs those industries create is a third. Mr. Biden is merely following Germany and other European Union countries down the primrose path to economic suicide.
 
According to Deutsche Bank, climate policy regulation of Germany’s automotive sector is triggering “the biggest structural break in the industry in decades.” A bank report explains that strict carbon dioxide limits for new passenger cars in the EU for 2021 and 2030 are forcing manufacturers to prematurely switch to higher cost electric vehicles. The resultant price increases, the bank predicts, will have a very negative effect on future employment in the Germany auto industry.
 
One reason is that the EU’s CO2 limits for passenger cars and subsidies for electric vehicles are “extremely inefficient [expensive] and hardly effective instruments” to achieve emission reduction in the transport sector. While government incentives and mandates may push people toward buying government-favored vehicles, radical climate and energy policies decrease investment in energy-intensive sectors such as metals and chemicals. This will further increase the cost of new German cars.
 
Despite the push for green energy and electric vehicles, the German Trade Union Association reports that the number of “green” jobs in the German renewables sector had fallen from 300,000 in 2011 to just 150,000 in 2018. Many of these lost jobs were due to the collapse of Germany’s solar power industry, as companies were forced out of business by Chinese manufacturers that undercut German prices – and had much easier access to raw materials.
 
The track record for American renewable industry jobs vis-à-vis Chinese competition has mimicked the German experience. A primary reason is China’s near-monopoly on rare-earth metals essential for the Green revolution. Despite these realities, Biden “climate envoy” John Kerry recently said displaced American oil and gas workers can simply and easily go to work making solar panels.
 
Energy economist Tilak Doshi agrees the West’s fascination with renewables-only de-carbonization, and ultimately de-industrialization, is a recipe for economic suicide. He notes that Germany’s “green” world involves behemoth wind turbines with blades made of petroleum-based, fiberglass-reinforced resins; motors built with iron and rare earths extracted, processed and smelted using fossil fuels; concrete that also requires fossil fuels; and factories run on coal and natural gas. Solar panels have the same pedigree.
 
The turbines and panels are installed in forests, grasslands, farmlands and coastal areas, where they destroy scenic vistas and wildlife habitats. Turbine blades kill endangered birds and bats.
 
The result of this save-the-planet zeal? Germany has a burgeoning 17% poverty rate, thanks largely to its shutdown of reliable nuclear and fossil fuel power plants and the resultant skyrocketing electricity prices for homes, factories, businesses and hospitals over the past 15 years.
 
Back in the USA, California operates the world’s fifth largest economy by importing most of its crude oil from overseas (despite massive in-state reserves) and a third of its electricity from other states (also for political expediency). As a result, Californians now pay 60% more than the national average for residential, commercial and industrial electricity, while enduring frequent rolling blackouts due to pricey weather-dependent energy and pathetic forest management. People and industries are fleeing the state.
 
And Team Biden-Harris (Harris-Biden?) wants to turn the rest of the United States into California!
 
Duggan Flanakin is director of policy research at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)
 

Science Theory Unbound by Test -- The Story of the Man-Made Global Warming Hypothesis

In 1988, James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, announced that NASA climate models indicated a tendency for heatwave drought situations in the Southeast and the Midwest USA in the late 1980s and the 1990s.  This prediction proved wrong.

Also in 1988, James Hansen, testified to our Congress that the Washington, D.C. area would go from 35 days a year warmer the 90F to 85 days a year in the next 50 to 60 years.  He also said the ocean will rise between one and six feet.  We are 32 years into that 50 to 60 years and so far the average number of days warmer than 90F has decreased.  According to NOAA, the rise in sea level from 1988 to 2020 was 9.81 cm or 3.86 inches. Once again, 32 years into that 50 to 60 year prediction, the rise of sea level is running way behind the low end of the prediction.

About the same time, James Hansen, told a reporter the West Side Highway running along the Hudson River on Manhattan Island would be underwater in 20 years.  The windows of Manhattan Buildings would all have tape across them due to the high winds.  I have been in Manhattan a number of times since the start of 2020.  Neither of these predictions have come to fruition.  

In June 2008, Hansen claimed there would be no Artic sea ice in the summer in 5 to 10 years.  Al Gore, not to be outdone, predicted that the entire North polar ice cap would be gone in 5 years. U.S. Navy scientists predicted the Artic could lose its summer sea ice in 2016.  In 2020 there was still considerable summer sea ice at the seasonal minimum, as there has been every year since 2008.  

In 2009, Prince Charles said we had 8 years to save the world.  Damn, we lost the world in 2017.

In 2014, the French Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius, said we had 500 days to avoid climate chaos.

Joe "The Great Idiot" Biden, Hanoi John Kerry, the stark raving mad 8 years to doomsday AOC, and the entire Elite of the Democratic Socialist Party claim that man-made global warming is an "existential" threat to planet Earth.  Where Trump may have exaggerated his Inaugeration crowd, Biden told us the massive lie that there is an existential threat to the Earth due to our use of carbon fuels.  This existential threat requires him to drag us back into the Paris Climate Accord, though it is an unratified treaty.  Of course, these politicians are just shills and mooks who have zero understanding of the science of radiative heat transfer.

Supposedly, the principal claim that the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis is true is the claim that its effects have been modeled correctly in their many global climate computer models.  They recently claimed these models are good at predicting the surface temperature, but the science the models are supposed to represent makes predictions of the atmospheric temperature throughout the atmosphere, not just at the surface.  What is more, the surface temperature record has been strongly biased upward in recent times and downward in the past, making it a very unreliable temperature record.  The atmospheric temperature record is much more a global record and has not been manipulated and affected by urban heat island effects in the way the surface temperature record has been.  So once again, let us present this comparison of the model temperature predictions for the atmosphere and actual temperature measurements of the atmospheric temperature:

The supposedly science-based global computer models predict much greater temperature increases than have been found in the measurements.  The scientific method demands that we declare the hypothesis of  catastrophic man-made global warming a failed hypothesis due its long history of failed predictions.  In other words, the continued belief in catastrophic man-made global warming is anti-science because it has ignored a basic requirement of the scientific method.

Why are its advocates claiming this anti-science belief is justification for putting more than 10,000 Keystone XL Pipeline workers into the already massive pool of the unemployed?  Why are they denying the livelihoods of some already who earn a living extracting oil and gas from federal lands and offshore fields and many in the future whose oil and gas jobs will not be created as a result?  Why are they damaging the earnings of the many people who provide goods and services to these carbon fuel industries and their employees?  Why are they forcing transportation costs for all Americans to rise greatly?  Why are they causing the energy costs to run our businesses and to operate our homes to increase drastically?  Why are they pushing a future of electricity brown-outs and black-outs upon us?  Why are they advocating spreading solar panels and wind generators over huge acreages of the nation?  Why do they now no longer care how many birds and bats are killed by wind generators?  Why do they want to saddle us with electric vehicles with their massive purchase cost, limited range, inconvenient recharging requirements, and massive repair costs?  Why do they not care about the massive damage to our future economy and the many jobs which will be lost, the many jobs that will not be created, and the many advances in other areas of human endeavor that will never come about because of a very harmful energy policy?

The answer is the desire for the Great Reset.  These advocates want what the World Economic Forum is advocating, which is an end to capitalism, an end to personal property, an end to individual rights, and a complete dependence upon government controlled by a socialist Elite.  Biden plagiarized his Build Back Better campaign slogan from the World Economic Forum for a reason.  Biden is not a creative man.  He has never created or built anything.  His specialty is the destruction of things built and created by others.  Even in his speeches and writings, he has a long history as a plagiarist.  So, it is entirely to be expected that the kind of people who are behind the World Economic Forum have made him their point man, albeit with many socialist managers, for exercising the program of the World Economic Forum upon the USA.  This program is absolutely evil and absolutely un-American.  Carrying it through is massively unconstitutional.  It will be extremely deleterious to the Welfare of the People of the USA.  Yet, it is moving forward rapidly under the Biden Regime.