The Left promises that millions of good ‘green jobs’ are right around the corner, but companies keep announcing layoffs in that extremely unproductive sector.
‘Green’ jobs are the first to go when times get tough, because they don't produce enough energy or value.
L eft-wing politicians promise that millions of good “green jobs” are right around the corner, but companies keep announcing layoffs in that extremely unproductive sector.
Just last week, General Electric announced it was laying off 20 percent of its entire U.S.-based onshore wind-power workforce, with hundreds of employees getting pink slips. “We are taking steps to streamline and size our onshore wind business for market realities to position us for future success. These are difficult decisions, which do not reflect on our employees’ dedication and hard work but are needed to ensure the business can compete and improve profitability over time,” a spokesperson for GE Renewable Energy told CNBC.
One might think that so-called green energy should be booming. After all, U.S. electricity prices are at record highs, with a kilowatt-hour in a U.S. city in August selling for 16 percent more than it would have just a year ago. The Democrats’ so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” pledged to invest $369 billion in wind and solar power over the next decade, giving a windfall of cash to the types of energy often favored by environmentalist activists. America already poured almost $450 billion into those energy sources between 2010 and 2019.
“Folks, when I think about climate change — and I’ve been saying this for three years — I think jobs,” President Biden said in July. But despite the vast sums of taxpayer money being pumped into everything green, the layoffs keep coming. On the same day as the president’s statement, Ford Motor Company announced it will have to lay off 8,000 employees to meet its quota of government-mandated electric vehicles.
In response to governmental pressure, Ford plans to spend $50 billion on electric cars each year by 2026, and that money has to come from somewhere, which means job cuts and price increases. Ford has to spend that money to comply with new Biden-administration greenhouse-gas-emission standards, which constitute a de facto electric-vehicle mandate, giving traditional car companies no choice but to build electric cars or buy credits from companies that do.
Yes, that’s right: Under Biden’s new rules, companies that don’t build electric cars would have to pay their competitors. When government mandates distort private investment decisions, consumers and workers inevitably bear the cost.
But GE and Ford aren’t the only companies that are going on a green firing spree. Solar companies are sacking employees as well, with mass layoffs rocking the industry in September and some companies sacking more than half their workforce. Even the New York Times admits that Biden has effectively “frozen” the U.S. solar industry because of its deep dependence on imported Chinese solar panels, which are often manufactured by the slave labor of Uyghur Muslims.
But that’s not the true cause of green layoffs. The reality is that as the economy slides into recession, unproductive sectors tend to do the worst . . . and green companies are deeply unproductive.
The entire U.S. generated only 163,703 thousand megawatt hours of electricity from utility solar power in 2021, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, while employing 255,037 workers in the industry, according to the National Solar Jobs Census. In contrast, nuclear power generated 778,152 thousand megawatt hours of electricity while employing 66,800 workers, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
So each solar worker generated only 640 megawatt hours of electricity (enough to power 57 homes), while each nuclear-power-industry employee generated 11,648 megawatt hours of electricity (enough to power 1,059 homes), making the average nuclear employee 18.2 times as productive at generating carbon dioxide–free electricity as the average solar employee.
In a possibly apocryphal but very revealing story beloved by economists, it’s said that Milton Friedman once witnessed thousands of workers toiling away building a canal with shovels while modern earth movers sat nearby unused. Friedman asked a government bureaucrat why more machines weren’t being used, to which the bureaucrat replied, “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” Friedman is said to have responded, “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, you should give these workers spoons, not shovels!”
Politicians love to tout the “green jobs” that solar and wind power supposedly create, but they’re really just forcing workers to use spoons instead of modern earth-moving gear — much less shovels.
It isn’t exactly surprising that unproductive green jobs are the first ones slashed by companies when economic times get tough. They simply don’t produce enough energy or value. And that remains true even as Biden’s ridiculous technology-specific subsidies for carbon dioxide–free electricity, which actively exclude nuclear power, seem to suggest that Biden thinks a megawatt of solar power is 18.2 times as valuable as a megawatt of nuclear power.