Forbes On Fox Panelist Says Creating Green Energy Jobs Is A Bad Thing
Reported by Guest Blogger - October 5, 2009 -
Guest blogged by Brian
Saturday's (10/3/09) Forbes on Fox featured a discussion on cap and trade with the suggestion that it might “melt down our job market.” Coincidentally, this suggestion came right after a Fox News alert advising that unemployment rose to 9.8%, the same week that Democrats in the Senate released their cap and trade bill. One panelist actually complained groused that the bill would create jobs, that that would be a bad thing, With video.
Panelist Jack Gage led off the discussion, saying, "The people that are backing this bill, mostly people from the left coast, Henry Waxman, Barbara Boxer, the people really advocating for this climate-change bill are those who don't live near coal producing states - places like Ohio, West Virginia, Michigan, where heavy industry uses traditional energy to employ its workers to make goods. They’re gonna get hit hard and those jobs are going to be lost as a result of this."
Host David Asman helped further that meme by adding, “Don’t forget the agricultural states that need the fertilizer, too.”
Actually, the co-author of the House bill was Edward Markey of Massachusetts which has a considerable amount of agriculture.
Panelist Mike Maiello said, "Well, this will definitely help jobs. I think modernizing our electric infrastructure and our power infrastructure and our industrial infrastructure can do nothing but create not only jobs, but good jobs."
Comment: John Podesta of the Center for American Progress said we could have a net increase of 1.7 million new jobs in manufacturing and construction by the innovation, development, and commercialization of new clean energy technologies. Podesta said it’s an opportunity “to capitalize on the most significant economic opportunity since the United States dominated the information technology revolution in the 1990s.” But rather than frame the discussion with “pluses and minuses of the cap and trade bill,” in a truly fair and balanced way, the segment was framed as, “Is the bill terrible or not?” with one pro-cap and trade voice vs. four anti voices.
Mike Ozanian noted that “a few” utilities will benefit from the legislation but, he quickly added, "By and large, the average working family will suffer. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that expenses for the typical American family will go up by $175. Three trillion dollars will be sucked out of the economy in just the first two years!"
Asman added, "These are the kind of expenses big companies can absorb, but the little and medium sized companies are going to have a… tough time with."
He forgot to mention that the act includes provisions to protect low-income families and farmers from any potential cost increases.
Bill Baldwin had the most astounding comment of all: "I think it's going to create jobs, and that's one of the bad things about clean energy… If all you do in moving from Fuel X to Fuel Y is to have more people creating the fuel, you’ve made a bad move, creating jobs is bad."
That was too much even for Asman. "Creating jobs is good," he said.
Baldwin insisted, "No, no, no, you're talking like a politician, David."
"I'm talking like a normal person with common sense," Asman countered.
Steve Forbes offered his take: "It's horrible for jobs. Each job you create, as Spain has demonstrated in studies there, you lose two to three jobs in what you destroy in the traditional sectors. This is expensive energy replacing cheap energy… It'll be more like $3000 per family when this thing is done." But nobody mentioned that the studies of Spain are not dispositive. As the Wall Street Journal (hardly a liberal outfit) reported, “But the study doesn’t actually identify those jobs allegedly destroyed by renewable-energy spending. What the study actually says is that government spending on renewable energy is less than half as efficient at job creation as private-sector spending. Specifically, each green job required on average 571,000 euros, compared with 259,000 euros in “average capital per worker” in the rest of the economy… The money the government has spent on clean energy may have edged out other government spending, but it’s hard to see how it could have edged out private-sector spending, especially when the Socialist government there has reduced corporate income-tax rates, most recently this past January.” Furthermore, the Wall Street Journal noted, the author of the study is a libertarian and a fellow at The Center for New Europe, a Brussels-based libertarian think tank that in recent years apparently accepted funding from Exxon Mobil.
According to FactCheck.org, Forbes’ $3,000-per-family cost estimate is dead wrong, too.
Maiello said we should consider nuclear energy as green energy. "If we… just realize that nuclear energy IS green energy, we can create jobs there and it will be great for the economy."
