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The Green Jobs Scam - and Confusion

02/23/09 1:56 PM EST

By IAIN MURRAY
Special to the Examiner

With the massive $787-billion stimulus bill including provisions to encourage the creation of "green jobs," Americans deserve an honest appraisal of how such green jobs will work.  So far, they aren't getting it. 

In fact, a recent statement by Al Gore shows just how much Americans are being misled on this issue.  Green jobs are a shell game, and we're falling for it.  In the Financial Times, on February 17, Gore, in an op ed co-authored with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, asserts that, "In the US, there are now more jobs in the wind industry than in the entire coal industry." 

But as Roger Pielke Jr of the University of Colorado points out, there is something wrong there.  In November 2008, the coal industry generated 155 million megawatt-hours of electricity, while wind generated only 1.3 million megawatt-hours.  If wind really does employ more people than coal, it is doing so at a huge cost to American efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness.

Of course, the wind industry does not employ more people.  Gore and Ban were flat out wrong in their assertion, which should make one question any assertions in Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, or any U.N. document, for that matter. 

As the Christian Science Monitor found out, the figure comes from an apples-and-oranges comparison.  An environmentalist blog had reported that the wind industry employed 85,000 people and the coal industry just 81,000. 

But the wind industry figure represented jobs as "varied as turbine component manufacturing, construction and installation of wind turbines, wind turbine operations and maintenance, legal and marketing services, and more," while the coal industry figure represented just coal miners.

Comparing apples to apples, the coal industry probably employs over 1.4 million people-and those workers are still over seven times as productive as the wind energy workers.

Moreover, when considering how much of the current boom in renewable energy is fueled by subsidies, it becomes clear that a large number of those wind industry jobs are temporary-engaged in the manufacture of parts for and construction of new wind farms.  Meanwhile, we have seemingly called a halt to the construction of new coal-fired power plants, just when the nation is facing a likely power generation shortage.

This problem is highlighted in a report from, of all people, The Sierra Club and the Teamsters union (among others).  "High Road or Low Road?" reveals that, "low pay is not uncommon" in green industries, that "wage rates at many wind and solar manufacturing facilities are below the national average," and suggests that wages for workers employed in the "green building" industry are also far lower than those of union members in other sectors.  Their proposed solution is to unionize these
industries, but remember just how unproductive they are even at these low wages.  Replacing a coal job with a "green job" is likely to be a net loss to the economy, meaning further unemployment down the chain.

Other nations have already started down this road.  The German government found that green jobs could only benefit the economy as long as the country remained a net exporter of green technology.  The finding in "High Road or Low Road?" that "some U.S. wind and solar manufacturers have already begun to offshore production of components destined for U.S. markets to low-wage havens such as China and Mexico" should therefore be sobering for green jobs proponents. 

A forthcoming study from Dr Gabriel Calzada of the Instituto Juan de Mariana in Spain reveals an even greater problem.  For every green job created in Spain, 3.9 jobs have been lost as a result throughout the economy.  The author calls them "subprime jobs," with good reason.

When America is in recession, the last thing we can afford to do is destroy more jobs than we create in the name of "stimulus."  The American people deserve to hear the truth about "green jobs." Unfortunately, as long as Al Gore and his allies continue to have the loudest bullhorns, they won't.

Iain Murray is Director of Projects and Analysis and Senior Fellow in Energy, Science and Technology at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of The Really Inconvenient Truths, from Regnery publishing.