Weekly John Locke Foundation research division newsletter focusing on environmental issues.
The newsletter highlights relevant analysis done by the JLF and other think tanks as well as items in the news.
1. More on the green jobs myth or "if you want to create farm jobs we can ban tractors"
Last week we cited some data about how some of the biggest green jobs failures have cost taxpayers in dollars and sense, but this article explains nicely how, even if they do not go belly-up, they still cannot, on net, create jobs. That is, they cannot create more jobs than they destroy. In this article, Todd Myers illustrates the point that you can’t on net create jobs by decreasing economic efficiency and increasing costs. He does this by looking at an extreme example of the basic principle being employed by the green jobs crowd. He argues they should go even greener and produce energy with an even more labor-intensive energy source — bicycle generators. Myers does the calculations. First he cites a claim made by the Political Economy Research Center at UMASS that "14 jobs are created per $1 million invested in solar energy, twice the amount created from coal." Then he notes
we can generate 500,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of perfectly clean energy (enough to power 80 houses for an entire year!) while creating hundreds of jobs… generating electricity using bicycle generators. Pedaling ten hours a day on a stationary bike, each person can generate 1 kWh. Investing $1 million in bicycle generators and paying people the going rate for the energy they create, we could create 1,610 jobs. There is another benefit: these are not part time jobs. These are full-time jobs for an entire year, unlike many of the temporary jobs often included in "green" jobs calculations.
And here’s the economic point, in case it’s not obvious:
The reason solar power creates more jobs per $1 million is that solar is extremely inefficient, requiring more workers to do more as they produce less.
But how does this destroy jobs in other areas? Myers explains what he has done in his example:
If you’ve done the math by now, you may have figured out that I am paying my green-energy producing bike riders only 10 cents a day — the average rate for generating one kWh of electricity in America. So, let’s pay them $10 a hour. The cost per kWh would rise from 10 cents to $1,000. This might make it more difficult for manufacturers to buy the electricity, but it hardly seems fair to demand our bike riders earn less than a living wage, and wealthy investors like Warren Buffet can certainly afford to pay a bit more for electricity.
So where do tractors come into all of this? Myers notes that we could apply this same principle to other areas. For example, what if, instead of wanting to create "green jobs" we wanted to create farm jobs.
If we want to create more farm jobs (after all the percentage of farm jobs in the economy has fallen dramatically in the last century), we could ban tractors. Think of all the jobs we’d create for farm workers! Of course, the cost of farm products would rise dramatically, making it more difficult to buy food, especially for low-income families. But do we want to create jobs or not?!
2. It’s worse than I thought
A few weeks ago I noted that the prediction being made by the NC Coastal Resource Commission’s Science Panel on Coastal Hazards that sea level rise along NC’s coast will be 39 inches over the next 90 years was not particularly useful for doing serious cost/benefit analysis, which should be the basis of public policy. This is because the prediction is made without attaching any probability statistic to it. But it is even worse than I thought. The prediction of 39 inches is based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios regarding global warming which themselves have no probability statistics associated with them. So the 39 inches of sea level rise prediction is a prediction without an associated statistical probability that is based on another prediction without a statistical probability. So not only is there no probability statistic attached to the sea level rise prediction, it would actually be impossible to calculate one.
3. Ozone Report
North Carolina has experienced its first high ozone days of the season this week. The 2012 ozone season began on April 1 and each week during the 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. The ozone season will end on October 31st. All reported data is from the North Carolina Division of Air Quality, which is part of the state’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources. During the period June 18th to June 25th there were 4 reported high ozone readings over 3 days on monitors across the state. Two of the high ozone readings were recorded on monitors in Rowan County, one was in Forsyth County and one was in Mecklenburg County. There are 40 ozone monitors in the state.
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