This weekly newsletter, focused on environmental issues, highlights relevant
analysis done by the John Locke Foundation and other think tanks, as well as
items in the news.

1. Green-Jobless in Seattle

A year ago last April, the city of Seattle received a $20 million federal grant
— i.e., wealth transfer from the rest of the country — to invest in building
weatherization projects
. In fact, on the eve of Earth Day 2010, the mayor
of Seattle took a trip to the other Washington (no word on whether the cost of
the trip was included in the grant) to join Vice President Joe Biden to
announce the awarding of the grant.

Allegedly the program — ripping out old insulation, installing new insulation,
stuff like that — would "create" "2000 living wage jobs …
retrofitting 2000 homes in poorer neighborhoods." There was no word on how
many jobs would be destroyed in the rest of the economy because of $20 million
that would be diverted from private investment to increased government debt or
because the price of insulation and building materials in the Seattle area
would bid up for everyone.

Anyway, the upshot is that a year and five months later, a grand total of 14
additional people have been employed as part of program. Presumably the same
number are lost from the $20 million transfer regardless of how few or how many
were "created." To top it all off, the retrofits that have taken
place have been in an athletic club and a few hospitals, not in
poor-neighborhood housing as was the plan.

For more on the problem of trying to create jobs through government subsidies
of so-called green technologies, see this
study
from the University of Illinois College of Law.

 

2. Sustainable energy or sustainable land use — it’s not
easy being green

Environmentalists typically argue for
sustainability in all things. Two biggies are sustainable energy, which
typically means energy from renewable sources like wind and solar power, and sustainable
land use, which typically means providing for housing and economic development
using as little land as possible. The latter has lead to calls for high-density
(i.e., congested) living arrangements, mandatory greenways, and urban growth
boundaries.

But what happens when goals conflict? Let’s pit sustainable energy against
sustainable land use and see what we get. The data below are from the U.S.
Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency.

 

Land Input for a 1,000 MW Power
Plant

Conventional Resources
Coal: 1,700 acres
Natural Gas: 110 acres
Petroleum: 120 acres
Nuclear: 500 to 1,000 acres

"Renewable" Resources
Industrial Wind
Turbines150,000 acres

Solar Photovoltaic 35,000
acres

 

Oh the frustrations of being a sustainability
advocate.


3. Weekly Ozone Report

Each week during the summer ozone season this newsletter will report how many,
if any, high-ozone days have been experienced throughout the state during the
previous week, where they were experienced, and how many have been recorded during
the entire season to date. While many environmental groups express concern
about air quality, the John Locke Foundation is the only organization that
keeps up-to-date track of the actual ozone data and reports it in an unfiltered
manner on a regular basis.

The ozone season began on April 1 and ends October 31. All reported data are
from the North Carolina Division of Air Quality, which is part of the state’s
Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

During the period from August 22 through August 28 there were no reported high-ozone
readings in the state of North Carolina. So far this season there have been 84
readings on various North Carolina monitors over 23 days that have exceeded
federal standards of 0.75 parts per billion.

 

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Update archive
.