"Tilting at Green Windmills"

In a post last fall ("A Green New Deal?"), we mentioned Van Jones's explication of the idea, advocated by many progressives, that government subsidies for solar and wind energy would spur job creation. In his Washington Post column yesterday ("Tilting at Green Windmills"), George Will draws on research from a Spanish economist who suggests otherwise. An excerpt:

WASHINGTON -- The Spanish professor is puzzled. Why, Gabriel Calzada wonders, is the U.S. president recommending that America emulate the Spanish model for creating "green jobs" in "alternative energy" even though Spain's unemployment rate is 18.1 percent -- more than double the European Union average -- partly because of spending on such jobs?

Calzada, 36, an economics professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, has produced a report which, if true, is inconvenient for the Obama administration's green agenda, and for some budget assumptions that are dependent upon it.

Calzada says Spain's torrential spending -- no other nation has so aggressively supported production of electricity from renewable sources -- on wind farms and other forms of alternative energy has indeed created jobs. But Calzada's report concludes that they often are temporary and have received $752,000 to $800,000 each in subsidies -- wind industry jobs cost even more, $1.4 million each. And each new job entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs that are either lost or not created in other industries because of the political allocation -- sub-optimum in terms of economic efficiency -- of capital. (European media regularly report "eco-corruption" leaving a "footprint of sleaze" -- gaming the subsidy systems, profiteering from land sales for wind farms, etc.) Calzada says the creation of jobs in alternative energy has subtracted about 110,000 jobs from elsewhere in Spain's economy.

Happy Earth Day

Hat tip to Dr. Mark Perry's Carpe Diem blog for those graphs. In his post on this, Dr. Perry comments,

Consider that since the first Earth Day in 1970, U.S. population has increased by 50.25%, miles driven has increased by 159% and real GDP has increased 203%; and yet air quality is better than ever.

Freeman Dyson in Tomorrow's NY Times Magazine

Tomorrow's New York Times Magazine features a cover article on the physicist Freeman Dyson, by Nicholas Dawidoff, "The Civil Heretic". The eighty five year old Dyson has led an eventful life so far, and the article covers a lot of its interesting parts. Below are a few brief excerpts of Dyson on Al Gore, James Hansen, and coal, followed by a brief note about Dyson's artistic sensibilities.

Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”

[...]

For Hansen, the dark agent of the looming environmental apocalypse is carbon dioxide contained in coal smoke. Coal, he has written, “is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.” Hansen has referred to railroad cars transporting coal as “death trains.” Dyson, on the other hand, told me in conversations and e-mail messages that “Jim Hansen’s crusade against coal overstates the harm carbon dioxide can do.” Dyson well remembers the lethal black London coal fog of his youth when, after a day of visiting the city, he would return to his hometown of Winchester with his white shirt collar turned black. Coal, Dyson says, contains “real pollutants” like soot, sulphur and nitrogen oxides, “really nasty stuff that makes people sick and looks ugly.” These are “rightly considered a moral evil,” he says, but they “can be reduced to low levels by scrubbers at an affordable cost.” He says Hansen “exploits” the toxic elements of burning coal as a way of condemning the carbon dioxide it releases, “which cannot be reduced at an affordable cost, but does not do any substantial harm.”

[...]

Dyson has great affection for coal and for one big reason: It is so inexpensive that most of the world can afford it. “There’s a lot of truth to the statement Greens are people who never had to worry about their grocery bills,” he says. (“Many of these people are my friends,” he will also tell you.) To Dyson, “the move of the populations of China and India from poverty to middle-class prosperity should be the great historic achievement of the century. Without coal it cannot happen.” That said, Dyson sees coal as the interim kindling of progress. In “roughly 50 years,” he predicts, solar energy will become cheap and abundant, and “there are many good reasons for preferring it to coal.”

The article notes in passing that Freeman Dyson disliked John Adams's opera "Dr. Atomic". That puts me in good company, I guess: I turned the PBS simulcast of this opera off after a half hour. Below is the trailer for the Metropolitan Opera's production of Dr. Atomic.

'A Green New Deal'?

In a recent post ("The Election") we speculated on some investment implications of Obama's victory and noted the conventional wisdom that this was bullish for green tech. In Barnes & Noble yesterday, I leafed through the book pictured above, by Van Jones¹. Van Jones sees green tech as a jobs program for blue collar workers, who can be employed building windmills, putting up solar panels, retrofitting buildings, etc.

I'm skeptical of how much of America's energy needs can be filled by solar and wind, but Jones seems to have a handle on the zeitgeist of today's progressives (i.e., liberals). Below is a short video of Jones giving the elevator pitch for his idea.





¹Van Jones is an attorney by profession, as is Robert Kennedy Jr., who wrote the forward to Jones's book (Kennedy became an environmentalist after he was busted for heroin possession in the early 1980s, and did community service for Riverkeeper as part of his plea bargain). In fact, most of the blurbs praising Jones's book come from those without science backgrounds. The tendency of environmental advocacy groups to be run by non-scientists was one noted by Michael Crichton in his novel State of Fear.