Examiner Editorial: With ‘green’ jobs, greenbacks will be scarce

President Barack Obama promises to create 5 million new "green" jobs. But they aren’t the kind of jobs that much benefit an advanced industrial society.

A report released in February by the Sierra Club concluded that "green jobs are not always good jobs" that can support a middle-class lifestyle. Despite heavy government subsidies, wind- and solar-energy manufacturers currently pay wages below the national average, and a third of nonunion green-construction
workers take home less than the federal poverty rate. For them, "green" means "poor."

San Francisco State University urban-studies professor Raquel Pinderhughes acknowledges that "employers describe basic work skills of being responsible, being on time, having good communications skills, etc. as the most critical skills for the green jobs they offer" in 22 sectors — including bus drivers and mechanics, landscapers, agricultural, construction and manufacturing workers, recyclers and maintenance people.

But these jobs are mostly low-paying manual labor that Pinderhuges admits "do not require high levels of education." And if Congress passes Obama’s job-killing cap-and-trade legislation, "green" will mean "poor" for millions more Americans.

But not everybody is drinking the green Kool-Aid.

Based on Spain’s disastrous experience with cap-and-trade over the last eight years, Dr. Gabriel Calzada, economics professor at Juan Carlos University in Madrid, estimates that "the U.S. should expect a loss of ... 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."

So if Obama’s proposals generate 5 million new green jobs, they would come at the expense of more than
11 million American workers who will lose theirs.

"Green jobs produce expensive, unreliable, uncompetitive energy," Institute for Energy Research President Thomas Pyle said in response to Rep. Henry Waxman’s green-jobs hearing last week.

The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis estimates that cap-and-trade, which relies heavily on expensive and unproven technology, will cost the American economy $4.8 trillion by 2030. Massive increases in energy costs will drive up the price of everything and throw millions more people out of work.

The trade-off for having less green in our wallets? Five million back-breaking green jobs that will supposedly ward off a climate catastrophe that’s being challenged by a growing number of international scientists, including the British Antarctic Survey, which is expected to confirm in a soon-to-be-published paper that sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere has actually expanded over the last three decades.

At this point, beleaguered taxpayers should be seeing red.