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 jobs training program a bust
In its zeal to centrally plan the economy and labor markets in the direction of so-called green technology, the Obama administration allocated, as part of its stimulus plan, $500 million to job training in the area of "green jobs." According to USA Today,
The program’s goal was to train 124,893 people and put 79,854 in jobs. But 17 months later, 52,762 were trained and 8,035 … had jobs.
Those numbers come from a Labor Department audit of the program.
Of course the reason for this failure in getting trainees placed in green jobs is that there has been a failure in the programs designed to stimulate the industries that would hire the trainees. In other words, the programs are training people for a field where there is not demand for their labor. In a related story by the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) Todd Myers points out a typical example that highlights the problem:
The City of Seattle recently admitted that a $20 million program to weatherize houses in Seattle will fall well short of the promised jobs goal. When it began, the City promised the program would create 2,000 jobs. As the Seattle P-I notes, however, "The program’s most recent quarterly report, ending in December, showed the program had created only 16 jobs."
Myers also points out that these programs are not only wasting money, they are wasting people’s time. Instead of training for meaningful employment where workers would be providing services that consumer and market participants actually want, the trainees are lured into pursing a dead end program by government money. As Myers notes:
The failure to face reality has a real cost, not only to taxpayers but to workers who spent time and money training for green jobs that don’t exist.
2. An avalanche of regulations to flow from EPA
A new study by a sister organization of the John Locke Foundation, The Texas Public Policy Foundation, argues that under the Obama Administration the EPA is "churning out new rules unprecedented in speed, number, scope, stringency and costs," adding that these new rules will "have marginal, if indeed measurable at all, health benefits." Buttressing this, the TPPF study notes that, "The National Academy of Science and the EPA’s own scientific advisory panels have sharply criticized regulations they see as framed on the basis of weak, manipulated scientific evidence."
The study (pdf) explains and looks at the costs and benefits of 10 new rules that the EPA is about to impose on utilities and industry. And of course the costs will be borne by consumers in the form of higher prices and energy costs. Here are the 10 rules that the paper examines:
- Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR)
- Electric Utility Maximum Available Control Technology Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (Utility MACT)
- Industrial Boiler MACT
- Portland Cement Kiln MACT
- Cooling Water Intake Structure Rule (CWIS)
- Coal Combustion Residuals Rule (CCR)
- Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS)
- Particulate Matter (PM) NAAQS
- Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Regulation of Stationary Sources
- GHG Regulation of Mobile Sources
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