Green Jobs Stupidity

[alienlovechild 75]

In 2005, green building was a small, burgeoning market, approximately 2% of both nonresidential (commercial and institutional) and residential construction, valued at a total $10 billion–$3 billion for nonresidential and $7 billion for nonresidential. Since that time, green building has expanded rapidly due to a number of factors such as growing public awareness of green practices, heavy increase in government interventions (see page 35 for details), and recognition by owners of the bottom line advantages (see page 9 for details). In fact, green building has grown in spite of the market downturn. Green seems to be one area of construction insulated by the downturn, and we expect green building will continue to grow over the next five years despite negative market conditions to be a $96-$140 billion market.

A green building isn't exactly a consumer product choice so you've got nothing showing a huge preference for green products beyond a niche market. It's more a more of a gimmick as advertisers know tha right buzzwords to use to pander a more upscale clientele that used to brag about affording bottled water under they found out plastic bottles end up in landfills.

Ironically, I brought some sugar, "Natural Crystals", "certified carbon free", "natural sugar" on the label. It was the cheapest one that sealed ad I got it because there are ants around here.

"Florida Crystals is a leading domestic sugar producer and North America’s first fully integrated cane sugar company, guiding our sugar from the field to the table. We are America’s first and only producer of certified organic sugar, grown and harvested in the United States, and the first sugar certified CarbonFree® by Carbonfund.org. Our renewable energy facility is the largest of its kind in North America and provides clean energy that powers our sugar operations and tens of thousands of homes, which helps us reduce our use of fossil fuels."

http://www.floridacrystals.com/content/130/about_us.aspx

Edited February 6, 2010 by alienlovechild

[Chali 0]

Green Jobs Stupidity

The president’s smug assertion that the “science” of global warming is settled turns out to be anther example of liberal-progressives’ dogmatic closed-mindedness. His continuing devotion to “green” jobs can only be described as willful stupidity.

Tom Emerson forwarded the Wall Street Journal’s European editorial opinion, which recounts the readily available information regarding the wasteful and feckless efforts of the Spanish and German governments to create green jobs.

No matter how one fudges the numbers or rationalizes about environmental benefits, green jobs require enormous government subsidies. The extra money for those subsidies is forcibly taken via taxes from businesses that would have been able to to use the money for more productive purposes. Thereby is an economy diminished. Green jobs, for example, in production of ethanol have raised food prices for the world’s poor and used more petroleum energy in production of ethanol than would have been used without ethanol.

The Journal’s editorial commences:

As he did for health care, President Obama has turned to Europe for inspiration on the environment. Countries such as Spain and Germany are “making real investments in renewable energy” and are “surging ahead of us,” he has warned. In last week’s State of the Union speech, Mr. Obama proposed to reverse the trend: “The nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy,” he said. “America must be that nation."

To say, “The nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy,” is equivalent to saying that those who waste the most money will become the richest. To suggest that green jobs will increase the productivity of our economy is nonsense.

Productivity increases come from discovering more efficient ways to produce existing goods and services, or to create new goods and services that people find useful. Green jobs reverse the process by making production less efficient and more costly and by producing goods and services that few people, given free choice, will want.

The president’s views make sense only under the rubric of Keynesian macroeconomics. Keynes, during the 1930s Depression, proclaimed that the only way to revive a depressed economy was application of large amounts of government spending. What the money was spent for was immaterial. Digging holes one day, filling them then next day, then endlessly repeating the cycle, would work nicely, Keynes thought.

“Green"jobs conform to that senseless paradigm. Green jobs add little if anything to the goods and services that people outside the rarified enclaves of the Northeast and Beverly Hills will pay for if given the opportunity to choose. Moreover, the product of green jobs is worth less than the cost to produce it, hence the necessity for government subsidies to producers and to buyers.

Economics is the study of allocating most efficiently and productively the limited amounts of resources available at any one time to a political society. Green jobs, CO2 regulation, and the whole clap-trap of smarter-than-you collectivist control favored by liberal-progressives is assuredly not economics. It is a wasteful sacrifice on the altar of the secular religion of socialism.

http://www.thomasbrewton.com/index.php/web...jobs_stupidity/

is there anything the President has done or supported that you dont find stupid? just wondering