Anyone interested in accurate assessment of environmental policy issues should track the work of an activist environmental organization headquartered in Montana; the Property and Environmental Research Center (PERC).http://perc.org/
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| Green jobs? Sure. Envrionmental enhancement. Not when conventional power plants have to be built to cover the power needs of the community when the windmills are down due to lack of wind! |
PERC has, over the years, been a stalwart in promoting Free Market Environmentalism (FME). The group proclaimes itself to be FME and in providing the complete, and documented, research regarding the many issues the company addresses.
One would be hard pressed to find an environmental organization of any kind presenting discussion of environmental policy issues in a more straight-forward and honest way than PERC demands of those publishing under the organization’s name. Perhaps the only flaw in the organization’s approach is that one can wonder why donations to a group dedicated to the free market are tax deductible meaning each and every citizen of the U.S. helps pay for the group’s work, like it or not; but, as I seem to be the only public policy wonk in America concerned about that nicety (Even the Ayn Rand Institute is a tax supported charity these days) PERC can be forgiven that little inconsistency.
According to PERC, FME “Is an approach to environmental problems that focuses on improving environmental quality using property rights and markets”
One of PERC’s offerings, the PERC Policy Series http://perc.org/articles/types/policy-series consists of several dozen longish essays, issued at a pace of a few per year, designed to inform journalists, educators and others regarding issues of the day from a point of view most environmental organizations will not touch.
Paper #44, published in 2009, deals with an issue much in the news recently: green jobs. Titled 7Myths About Green Jobs,
the paper examines the idea, much touted by the Obama Administration idea that a “…massive program of government mandates, subsidies, and forced technological interventions will reward the nation with an economy brimming with ‘green jobs.”
In fact, the authors of 7 Myths About Green Jobs put forward, “…these claims about the wonders of green jobs are built on a number of myths about economics, forecasting, and technology.”
PERC points to a number of obvious problems with the approaches the Obama Administration, along with other pop environmental groups pursue.
For example, myth one is put forward as being, “Everyone knows what a “green job” is.”
In fact, according to the paper, “No standard definition of a “green job” exists in the green jobs literature,” so the billions of dollars already spent, and proposed to be spent, on so called green jobs, cannot be rationally justified because there is no standard to measure success by.
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| A log conventional sawmills would reject. The lumber in the background, sawn from logs like this do not qualify for LEED certification because they do not come from a healthy, growing forest certified as such. Weird isn't it? |
For example, imagine a truck driver picks up a load of lumber from a small local sawmill. The lumber is milled from large limbs recovered from a fallen tree near the town library. The driver delivers the lumber to a home across town for use as flooring. Had the lumber not been milled the limbs would have been sawn up for firewood.
Then, the truck, driven by a different driver picks up a similar load of lumber at the local lumber yard destined for the same house. The lumber was shipped in from two hundred miles away, the nearest wholesale yard with LEED certifiable lumber harvested from a healthy forest.
Which driver would be considered to have a “green job?” Why, to the pop environmental movement, of course, the driver transporting the lumber processed from healthy trees cut down in the healthy forest two hundred miles away!
A second myth PERC points to hold that, “Creating green jobs will boost productive employment.”
In fact, according to 7Myths, “Green jobs estimates include huge numbers of clerical and administrative positions that do not produce output.”
In the case of the example I’ve put forward above, the private mill owner loaded the boards onto the truck, created an invoice and delivered the lumber.
Certified lumber, on the other hand, is more a function of paperwork than actual environmental enhancements. Beginning with the need to register the forest and document actions required to grow the trees, green lumber has to have “chain of custody” documentation every time it changes hands. Lots of jobs but no added value, unless government decides to choose winners and requires certified wood in lieu of lumber produced to higher environmental standards.
According to PERC, the idea that “Green jobs forecasts are reliable,” is a myth as well. In fact, “Green jobs studies make estimates using poor models based on dubious assumptions.”
By way of example, my home county, Whatcom, is an area containing or adjacent to many millions of contiguous acres available for hiking, biking and, walking trails. Still, the pop environmental movement recently contended that adding less than ten thousand acres of land to the multimillion acre base already available would result in hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of new green jobs; a number outlandishly out of sync with the jobs produced by already existing acres.
Popular in recent years is the idea that “The world economy can be remade by reducing trade, relying on local production, and lowering consumption without decreasing our standard of living.”
Not a single iron deposit of any size in Whatcom County nor, for that matter, in Washington. Basically, nothing in the computer I’m using could be produced locally. For that matter, Whatcom County simply does not have the ability to feed itself, much less… Ah, come on, is there a more disingenuous argument on the face of the planet?
New environmental initiatives based on solid approaches to solving environmental problems do have the potential to create significant numbers of green jobs in our future. Unfortunately, when government gets involved in environmental issues, decisions are made based on politics, not economics. When government tries to choose the winners and the losers, the result is almost always jobs lost, money squandered and, a degraded, rather than enhanced, environment.
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