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.
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