Groundbreaking Study Puts Real-World Numbers Behind The
Promise of "Green Jobs"
By Jim Sims - (Reprinted with permission.) Copyright 2001-2008, Western Business
Roundtable. All rights reserved.
While some U.S. politicians point to Spain as a model
for how government subsidies can create "green jobs," a groundbreaking new study (Employment - public aid - renewable.pdf)
documents that every renewable job created by the Spanish government destroyed
an average of 2.2 other jobs. Each “green” megawatt installed in Spain
destroyed 5.39 jobs in non-energy sectors, the study found.
Moreover, only one in 10 jobs created in Spain were
of a permanent nature, the study found, with two-thirds consisting of temporary
jobs in construction, fabrication and installation jobs; one quarter were
positions in administration, marketing and projects engineering; and only one
of ten was related to more permanent operations and maintenance of renewable
power systems.
If U.S. subsidies to renewable producers achieve
the same result -- and President Obama has held Spain up as a model for how to
subsidize renewables -- the U.S. could lose 6.6 million to 11 million jobs
while it creates three million largely temporary “green jobs," the study
predicts.
The study was prepared under the direction of
Dr. Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor at Juan Carlos University in
Madrid.
"Spain’s experience (cited by President Obama as
a model) reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the U.S.
should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about 9 jobs lost for
every 4 created, to which we have to add those jobs that non-subsidized
investments with the same resources would have created."
“The study’s results demonstrate how such ‘green
jobs’ policy clearly hinders Spain’s way out of the current economic crisis,
even while U.S. politicians insist that rushing into such a scheme will ease
their own emergence from the turmoil. … This study marks the very first time a
critical analysis of the actual performance and impact has been made," Dr.
Calzada wrote in the study's introduction.
"As President Obama correctly remarked, Spain
provides a reference for the establishment of government aid to renewable
energy," the study notes. "No other country has given such
broad support to the construction and production of electricity through
renewable sources. The arguments for Spain’s and Europe’s 'green jobs' schemes
are the same arguments now made in the U.S., principally that massive public
support would produce large numbers of green jobs. The question that this paper
answers is 'at what price?'"
The study calculated that, since 2000, Spain spent
$774,000 to create each “green job”, including subsidies of more than $1.3
million per wind industry job. It found that creating those jobs resulted in
the destruction of nearly 113,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs
destroyed for every “green job” created. Principally, jobs were lost in the
fields of metallurgy, non-metallic mining and food processing, beverage and
tobacco.
“The loss of jobs could be greater if you account for
the amount of lost industry that moves out of the country due to higher energy
prices,” Dr., Calzada said recently in an interview with Bloomberg News.
Ironically, as noted recently by the Institute for Energy
Research (http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/), the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has calculated that Spain’s
annual emissions of carbon dioxide have increased by nearly 50
percent since the launch of the subsidized "green jobs" program.
"The price of a comprehensive energy rate, paid by the
end consumer in Spain, would have to be increased 31 percent to begin to repay
the historic debt generated by this rate deficit mainly produced by the
subsidies to renewables, according to Spain’s energy regulator. Spanish
citizens must therefore cope with either an increase of electricity rates or
increased taxes (and public deficit), as will the U.S. if it follows Spain’s
model," the study found.
Further Reading
Green Jobs, Ole: Is the Spanish Clean-Energy Push a
Cautionary Tale?
Green Jobs: Fact or Fiction?
