Monday 15 June 2009

I wonder how Timmy will feel about this?

Is this a situation where they both lose? Timmy always says that jobs are a cost, not a benefit, so is the fact that:

for every green energy job created:

2.2 on average will be lost, or about nine jobs lost for every four created, to which we have to add those jobs that non-subsidized investments with the same resources would have created.

In addition actually nine out of ten promised green jobs created were not even permanent. To put it in a different way: every green megawatt created:

destroyed 5.28 jobs on average elsewhere in the economy: 8.99 by photovoltaics, 4.27 by wind energy, 5.05 by mini-hydro.



So does Timmy think this is a good thing or a bad thing?

It think that this bit is incontrovertibly bad, though:

the investment of $36 billion so far created only $10 billion worth in real market prize of energy. Thus renewable mandates have caused already severe damage to the Spanish economy with energy costs increasing nearly 55%. For some companies such as Ferrroatlantico energy cost for its production of iron alloys soared from 37% in 1997 to 43 % in 2005.


Fucking hell.

1 comment:

Garry said...

It's a tricky one this.

This problem will have to be faced eventually. Fossil fuels can't last forever, and by all accounts Uranium is pretty scarce too.

There's no way a country using less efficient "green" fuels can compete with countries using fossil fuels.

It seems as though all you can do, is encourage research in alternatives and hope like hell you're ready to hit the ground running when the time to switch over comes.