Chris Horner gets to follow John Doerr in this remarkable CNS piece (but I suspect he would have liked to say more about Kleiner Perkins and the skin it has in this game.)

Experts advising the White House on economic recovery have reached a “remarkable consensus” on the need for green jobs to make the United States competitive around the world. It was announced Wednesday at a meeting of the President’s Economic Advisory Board.
That assessment, consistent with the Obama administration’s environmental policies, conflicts with an academic study examining the consequences of the government promoting “green jobs” in Spain.
A number of the policies instituted there have been referenced by the Obama administration as worth implementing in the United States.
However, for every four green jobs created in Spain, nine regular jobs were lost, according to the study by Universidad Rey Juan Carlos.
“We talked about energy and clean energy and the opportunity and necessity for reform – there was remarkable consensus from this group,” said Paul Volcker, chairman of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, after the first quarterly meeting with President Barack Obama on Wednesday at the White House.
The study from Spain also showed that only one in 10 green jobs created in that country were permanent jobs.
The Economic Recovery Advisory Board’s leading voice on “green jobs” has been John Doerr, a partner with Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers, the venture capital firm that has invested heavily in green technology companies.
He echoes the “remarkable consensus” from the board and said he was not familiar with the Spain study. However, he said he had confidence in the United States and that green jobs would be created.
“These are U.S.-based jobs, insulating homes, installing solar panels – and those are not going to be temporary,” Doerr told CNSNews.com. “Those are going to be for a long time to come.”
Doerr also affirmed that the jobs would be in the private sector and could “definitely” function without government subsidies.
“What we need to do is generate great green jobs to make sure America leads in the great new green economy,” Doerr said. “It’s very important to the environment. It’s very important to our economy. It’s very important in trying to create jobs.
“America is not the leader right now,” said Doerr. “We’re in the race, but we’re not in the head of the race. We will advise the administration and the president to ‘incentivize’ this to make it very clear for businesses that will invest.”
But green jobs have never survived without government subsidies, said Christopher Horner, a senior fellow and environmental expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank.
“There is no likelihood these [jobs] won’t be subsidized,” Horner told CNSNews.com. “You should think of these as government jobs. Germany and Spain have increased unemployment with this confiscation of wealth.”
When promoting his economic stimulus package earlier this year, Obama said, “Think of what’s happening in countries like Spain, Germany and Japan, where they’re making real investments in renewable energy.”
However, the study from Spain noted: “Optimistically treating European Commission partially funded data, we find that for every renewable energy job that the state manages to finance, Spain’s experience cited by President Obama as a model reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about 9 jobs lost for every 4 created, to which we have to add those jobs that non-subsidized investments with the same resources would have created.”
“Everywhere, this [green jobs] is being sold as an ideologically driven myth,” Horner said.
The White House focus on green jobs came one day after Obama announced that the United States would impose stricter fuel efficiency standards on the nation’s fleet of auto vehicles.