If timing is everything, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation had already missed the boat when it released a self-serving report last month purporting to prove that putting five mid-Atlantic states and the District of Columbia on a strict “pollution diet” would create more jobs than it destroys. That is why CBF’s “Debunking the ‘Job Killer’ Myth: How Pollution Limits Encourage Jobs in the Chesapeake Bay Region” should be viewed with more than a little skepticism. After all, this is the same argument President Obama used in his 2011 State of the Union address when he promised that his green energy agenda would “create countless new jobs for our people.” That was just months before Solyndra, the president’s poster child for green jobs and recipient of a $535 million taxpayer-funded load guarantee, laid off its 1,100 employees and the Wall Street Journal reported that “plummeting stock prices and crushing debt load are calling into question the viability” of the entire solar industry. Even the New York Times admitted that Obama’s pledge to create five million green jobs was only “a pipe dream” after all.
So the report’s conclusion that implementing the Environmental Protection Agency’s draconian 2010 guidelines — which require that the “total maximum daily load” entering Chesapeake Bay be reduced 25 percent by 2025 — will create 240,000 jobs is highly questionable. Deploying an army of EPA cops will consume billions of tax dollars, while farms and businesses located within the Bay’s 64,000-square-mile watershed are strait-jacketed into compliance (many of which will cease operations or go out of business).
When House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia and Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., correctly pointed out that the “pollution diet” was also a “job destroyer,” their warning was dismissed as a “red herring” by CBF President Will Baker. But Baker himself conceded that most of the clean-the-Bay jobs are dependent on significant taxpayer funding, which will squeeze anywhere between $7 billion and $10 billion out of the affected states’ economies. This will not only divert billions from the wealth-producing private sector to the wealth-consuming regulatory sector, but the domino effect will greatly increase the cost of housing, food, goods and services. It would also redirect resources that would otherwise have been used to hire more workers with real private sector jobs.
In one of the few studies that specifically looked at job losses related to environmental regulations, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Michael Greenstone concluded that 590,000 jobs were eliminated in the 15 years following major changes to the Clean Air Act. History and common sense refute the notion that it will be any different this time.
