Is the Renewable Energy Industry Nothing More Than a Jobs Program?
2 days ago Guest Blogger 63 Comments
— For the most part, it is.
By Julius Sanks
Milton Friedman famously, and probably apocryphally, upon seeing a canal being dug by hand rather than with modern equipment, is said to have remarked: “Oh, I thought you were building a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
Whether the tale is true or not, we are now seeing something similar in real life. Over at Grist, journalist Kate Yoder crows that young people are supposedly heading to renewable energy jobs rather than work for the evil fossil fuel companies. Maybe — the evidence she provides is pretty skimpy — but one statistic she provides is interesting. According to her source E2.org, in 2021 the USA employed about 3.2 million people in “clean energy” jobs, and that was 3.5 times more than in fossil fuels. Doing the math, that is about 915,000 working in fossil. I found that difficult to believe.
E2’s report got me wondering about energy production and the associated labor. Labor is, after all, a big part of any industry’s cost. The renewable advocates often crow about how the industries they like are growing, but rarely compare their industries to the competition. Since E2 was talking jobs, I decided to look at actual energy production and the labor to get it. This ignores work that uses, but does not produce, energy; e.g., making electric vehicles or “smart” transmission.
All E2 did was analyze a Department of Energy (DoE) jobs report and publish part of its content. The E2 report includes work that does not directly compare to fossil energy production, but does not seem to do the same thing on the fossil side. For example, E2 cites Energy Star manufacture. An appliance does not care how the electricity it uses was generated. So E2’s analysis compares “apples and oranges.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/12/09/is-the-renewable-energy-industry-nothing-more-than-a-jobs-program/
