GE’s Immelt regrets green push, but a lucrative new source of subsidies is on the horizon

 He told an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

While one can question his word choice about “believing” in global warming – as if it were a catechism – the word I’m most interested in is “jobs.”

I’ve long assumed the primary focus of the heads of large public companies was to provide maximum returns to shareholders (something of a sore point for long-suffering GE shareholders during Immelt’s tenure).

Still, his remark about jobs is telling. Perhaps it’s marketing. Immelt does head-up the President’s “Council,” which is supposed to provide advice and, one might assume, policy guidance on job creation.

Or perhaps it’s guilt. The last GE plant manufacturing incandescent light bulbs – located in Winchester, Virginia — was shut down, owing in no small part to the federal rules GE lobbied for that will phase-out the bulbs company founder Thomas Edison invented.  Two hundred-three jobs were eliminated.

The rest of the factory’s output was outsourced to Mexico.

But there may be another reason for his focus on jobs, as opposed to profits. And that story, too, comes from Virginia. In an announcement that had Gov. Bob McDonnell “celebrating,” GE was given gobs of taxpayer money to bring 200 jobs to its existing facility in Henrico County.

The Governor may celebrate. Virginians, not so much. The state not only had to hand GE subsidies, it lost three net jobs in the process.

So maybe Immelt’s remarks were a sort of Freudian slip. He cares about jobs because that’s where the subsidies are and, if Virginia is any guide, the political class is only too eager to write the checks. And unlike the public monies handed out for green energy, economic development subsidies bring with them the promise of helping people right now.

And unlike the planet, those people vote.