Don't Have Delusions About Green Jobs

The human mind has trouble envisioning change. The first automobiles were built as horseless carriages. We will send e-mail even as our children no longer remember what "the mail" ever was.

So likewise, when we imagine a world evolving beyond fossil fuels, we imagine a world of cars powered by hydrogen motors or electrical utilities operating wind farms instead of coal-fired generators.

And who knows: perhaps the future really will look like that.

But my own guess is that a world in which coal and oil are fading from the scene will look and function very differently from our present world of exurbs and super-highways.

The industrial economy built on fossil fuels will yield to a different kind of economy that may still require enormous amounts of energy, but will be organized in very different ways. If solar panels ever generate cost-effective electricity, I doubt they'll be owned and maintained by utilities. They'll be owned and maintained by the owners of the buildings to which the panels are affixed.

Likewise, the hope expressed by President Obama that the transition to a new energy future can double as a way to preserve the mass production workforce of the mid-20th century seems at best delusive, at worst a cruel hoax - and actually most of the time a distraction from other more immediate and relevant economic problems.

The president's talk of green jobs reminds me of how the "Atari Democrats" of the 1980s used to muse that the industrial workforce displaced by the economic changes of the 1970s could find work making semiconductors. The computer industry created millions of new jobs, yes, including some very exciting and well-paid new jobs. But instead of rescuing the embattled blue-collar middle class, the new jobs heaped additional rewards of higher pay and lower prices on the educated and the qualified.

No predictions from me about the economic and social effects of green energy. But here's what I would predict: we're rapidly going to discover that new energy forms will destroy many more energy-sector jobs than they create.

And we'll (re)discover for the umpteenth time that the reason government fails as a venture capitalist is that government faces too many and too contradictory goals. Government effort to subsidize "green jobs" will emerge - not as a benefit from the spread of green energy - but as one of the greatest obstacles impeding the spread of green energy.

--More to Come--