Ban Ki Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, has the solution de jure for our current economic woes: governments should create jobs in "green" industries. He begins his sermon to the choir in the San Francisco Chronicle with this wave of the wand:
Amid the pressures of the global financial crisis, some ask how we can afford to tackle climate change. The better question is: Can we afford not to?
Put aside the familiar arguments - that the science is clear, that climate change represents an indisputable existential threat to the planet, and that every day we do not act the problem grows worse. Instead, let us make the case purely on bread-and-butter economics.
This is a useful beginning: a preposterous statement is declared to be gospel truth and all dissent is summarily brushed aside. But it is preposterous. There is nothing at all unusual about recent climate trends, including the cooling period that has lasted about ten years now. I can say without fear of contradiction that the world climate in the foreseeable future can't be foreseen: it will get cooler or warmer or stay about the same. For someone wanting confirmation, see geologist Robert Carter's piece in Economic Analysis and Policy.
But even if you accept the global warming hypothesis, it would do to point out that climate change is something that the world has lived with for much longer than human beings, or any living beings, have existed on the planet. It has been warmer in the past than it is now, and much cooler. Somehow the polar bears and bare ass human beings managed to survive. That is not at all to say that we should not be concerned. Professor Carter thinks, as I do, that the global warming gospel is an impediment to the serious thinking that we need to do. We have to prepare for whatever nature has in store for us, instead of assuming that we know what that is. But to speak of "existential threats to the planet" is to trade the realm of science for the kingdom of fairies.
But I will put aside reason and evidence on this question, as Secretary General Ban would have me do, and ask whether his recommendations make sense if the world is really facing an existential crisis. Does it really make sense to solve the current economic crisis by investing billions in "green technologies"?
He is clearly right that many countries have created jobs in biofuels. The trouble is, biofuels aren't "green" in any meaningful sense. Corn produced ethanol is an environmental and humanitarian disaster. It produces more greenhouse gases than petroleum industries; it pollutes the environment where corn is grown and ethanol produced; it has resulted, in places like South Dakota, in virgin prairie being tilled for the first time; and it has raised world food prices, which is something that those living on the margin can ill afford. Best of all, it is less efficient than petroleum based technologies and so makes the world energy problem worse rather than better.
All this means that biofuels create jobs, but at a terrible price. We would do better just to pay all these workers for sitting home with their lights off. Wind power probably does have a place in our energy budget. Single towers on isolate farms, or small wind farms for isolated communities, could reduce the demand those spots place on the grid. Someday soon (but not yet, given current wind technology), this might accomplish a net reduction in energy demand. But big wind farms are only a means of turning wind energy into federal tax subsidies.
Government is very bad at balancing economic or environmental books. Case in point, from the Washington Post:
The federal government has invested billions of dollars over the past 16 years, building a fleet of 112,000 alternative-fuel vehicles to serve as a model for a national movement away from fossil fuels.
Under a mandate from Congress, federal agencies have gradually increased their fleets of alternative-fuel vehicles, a majority of them "flex-fuel," capable of running on either gasoline or ethanol-based E85 fuel. But many of the vehicles were sent to locations hundreds of miles from any alternative fueling sites, the analysis shows.
As a result, more than 92 percent of the fuel used in the government's alternative-fuel fleet continues to be standard gasoline.
Got that? The Fed bought a lot of cars built to run on biofuels and then sent them to places where biofuels were unavailable. That's how government works. When private industry does this sort of thing, it either goes belly up or gets saved by a government bailout. But it gets better.
The Postal Service illustrates the problem. It estimates that its 37,000 newer alternative-fuel delivery vans, which can run on high-grade ethanol, consumed 1.5 million additional gallons of gasoline last fiscal year because of the larger engines.
The vehicles that would allow the agency to meet federal mandates were available in six- and eight-cylinder models -- not the four-cylinder variety it traditionally purchased. Alternative fuel was used less than 1 percent of the time in 2007-2008.
So the net result of buying "alternative-fuel delivery vans" for the Post Office was burning a million and a half more gallons of gasoline! There's progress for you.
Government investment in green technologies is not always bad. Setting general efficiency standards, and then letting the market meet those standards, works pretty well. But Secretary General Ban's prescription for government created green industries to create jobs and save the environment will cost jobs, as money is shifted from productive enterprises to unproductive ones. Oh, and it will hurt the environment.
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