Dishonesty and Incompetence in the Greenery

I don't usually cut and paste other people's work but this piece is so good I had toshare it with you.

 

The writer is a friend of 52 years, a former newspaper editor, top financial journalist and author.

 

The US administration’s multi-billion plan to create “green” jobs – President Obama offered the rosy prospect of five million new jobs -- “has failed to produce any of the benefits initially claimed,” says energy expert Allen Brooks.

Although some of the failures are obvious, such as the bankruptcy of solar energy companies after they hoovered up massive government subsidies, others are harder to pin down because of “lack of a consistent and accurate measurement” of claimed benefits.

Conveniently, the administration has avoided releasing estimates of job creation due to “inconsistencies” in the self-reported statistics.

However we do know that a half-billion-dollar Labor Department programme to train people for 79,854 green jobs has been condemned as a “dismal failure” by its Inspector General as it created only 8,035 jobs.

A clear defect of depending on self-reporting by public authorities is that they conveniently classify as “green,” many jobs that average folk wouldn’t think to be such. For example, when independent consultants investigated the reported increase in “green” jobs in Michigan, they found the largest number of positions created was for garbage collectors. Next most numerous came water and sewage treatment workers, then office clerks.

In New York and Washington DC, 56 per cent of all jobs classified as “green” are in fact researchers, lawyers, consultants and similar who constitute the bloated bureaucratic infrastructure for promoting greenery rather than people actually doing green jobs.

According to a report in the New York Times, 19 factories in the developing world are making huge profits from “an unlikely business” – producing coolant gases said to worsen global warming, so they can earn carbon credits from destroying their waste product.

They realized that under the United Nations scheme to combat generation of greenhouse gases they could earn one carbon credit from eliminating one ton of carbon dioxide – but more than 11,000 credits for destroying a ton of an obscure waste gas normally released in the manufacture of a widely-used coolant gas, HFC-22.

Carbon credits earned can be sold on the international market for anything from $9 to nearly $40 apiece, probably earning each plant an average of $20-40 million a year. This incentive has driven plants in countries such as India and China to keep high, production of the coolant gas blamed for worsening global warming… even boost output.

The UN and the European Union have known about this unintended consequence for several years, but struggles to end it because of the vested interest of companies that have come to depend on earnings from carbon credits that they are essentially “printing.”

Some Chinese producers have warned that if they stop getting paid for such credits, they will vent waste gas into the sky – which is not illegal in China or India.