Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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 Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2011 3:12 pm Post subject: Obama's Green Jobs Initiative a Clear Failure |
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Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live Up to Promises
The NYTimes looks at Obama's promise to add 500,000 green jobs over the next 10 years.
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A study released in July by the non-partisan Brookings Institution found clean-technology jobs accounted for just 2 percent of employment nationwide and only slightly more � 2.2 percent � in Silicon Valley. Rather than adding jobs, the study found, the sector actually lost 492 positions from 2003 to 2010 in the South Bay, where the unemployment rate in June was 10.5 percent.
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Federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show. Two years after it was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize drafty homes, California has spent only a little over half that sum and has so far created the equivalent of just 538 full-time jobs in the last quarter, according to the State Department of Community Services and Development.
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The Economic Development Department in California reports that $59 million in state, federal and private money dedicated to green jobs training and apprenticeship has led to only 719 job placements � the equivalent of an $82,000 subsidy for each one.
�The demand�s just not there to take this to scale,� said Fred Lucero, project manager at Richmond BUILD, which teaches students the basics of carpentry and electrical work in addition to specifically �green� trades like solar installation.
Richmond BUILD has found jobs for 159 of the 221 students who have entered its clean-energy program � but only 35 graduates are employed with solar and energy efficiency companies, with the balance doing more traditional building trades work. |
In the article, some commentators blame the failure of cap-n-trade legislation, although carbon taxes would have been a more efficient way to price carbon externalities.
But it doesn't matter. Gov't mandated industrial policy only rarely works, because the gov't cannot control market demand. |
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