As the battle over climate change legislation heats up, several Big
Green groups -- the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources
Defense Council and the Sierra Club -- are rolling out TV and Internet ads
designed to persuade voters that regulating greenhouse gas emissions
will create green jobs. David Yarnold, the president of EDF's Action
Fund, sums up the message in an email: "Carbon Caps = Hard Hats."
Clever.
Here's an ad from EDF's campaign, launched in partnership with
the United Steelworkers union and the Blue Green alliance, a group of
enviromental groups and unions.
Think of this ad, and the one below, as the "Harry and Louise" ads of
the campaign to pass global warming legislation. You remember Harry and Louise,
right? They were the couple who turned a devilishly complicated issue,
health care reform, into a soundbite ("If we let the government choose,
we lose") and helped kill the 1994 Clinton health plan. These ads take
what may be an even more devilishly complicated issue, climate change
regulation, and use images of brawny construction workers to turn it
into an even shorter soundbite: "Green jobs." Take a look at this spot
from The Blue Green Alliance:
Maybe I missed it, but did you hear an environmental message in either of those ads?
Of course, there's research to support the claims about green jobs.
In the interests of full disclosure, I need to say here that I've been
doing some freelance work for EDF and NRDC -- organizations I admire a
great deal. But these claims about green jobs deserve greater scrutiny.
Last June, for example, the Blue Green Alliance, Sierra Club, NRDC and the steelworkers issued a green jobs report from the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. It said:
"…millions of U.S. workers -- across a wide range of
familiar occupations, states, and income and skill levels -- will benefit
from the project of defeating global warming and transforming the
United States into a green economy."
A second report from PERI,
issued last September under the auspices of the Center for American
Progress, got more granular. In my home state of Maryland, for example,
the authors project that a $100 billion green economic recovery program
would create 36,739 jobs. They would be created in such industries as
building retrofitting, mass transit and freight rail, smart grid, wind
power, solar power and advanced biofuels.
It sounds great, doesn't it?
Not according to the four lawyers and economists who produced "7 Myths About Green Jobs," a 97-page report published by the University of Illinois College of Law. They argue that "the green jobs literature is rife with internal
contradictions, vague terminology, dubious science, and ignorance of
basic economic principles."
Studies by conservative think tanks go further, claiming that climate legislation will destroy millions of jobs. A 2008 Heritage Foundation study
claimed that passage of last year's Lieberman-Warner bill would create "extraordinary perils for the American economy" and cause annual job losses of between 500,000 and 1,000,000 after a few years of job gains. (This report was pretty thoroughly discredited by NRDC.)
The best thing I've read about this debate (and one of the most balanced) is this fine Slate article by Eric Pooley, my former editor at FORTUNE, who finds that there's an
emerging economic consensus that the costs of dealing with climate
change are significant but manageable -- and that given the risks, those
costs are likely worth paying.
My point here is not that economists disagree. My point is that the
climate change debate shouldn't be about green jobs.
It's intellectually dishonest to pretend that we can forecast, with any
degree of accuracy, the impact of a complicated government policy on a
dynamic global economy decades into the future. Both sides know that
their projections are based on a host of assumptions which may or may
not come true.
What if we decide as a nation to turn to nuclear energy
as a source of low-carbon power? That probably won't create many
long-term jobs. What if there's a breakthrough in the solar PV business
in China? That may not bring green jobs here. Are farmers who grow corn
for ethanol doing green jobs? That hasn't turned out so well.
Let's get real: We can't predict oil prices 12 months out. Last
spring, virtually no one anticipated the global financial crisis of
last fall. And we are projecting the number of green jobs that will be
created or lost on a state-by-state basis by a law that won’t take
effect until 2012? Who are we kidding?
I called Russ Roberts, an economist at George Mason University who hosts the fine EconTalk podcast,
for some guidance on how to think about green jobs and the economics of
climate regulation. "Creating green jobs is easy," he told me. "We
could employ millions of people picking up litter, and we could make
them very good-paying jobs if we want. But of course that would make us
poorer as a nation. There’s a cost to providing those jobs that would
have to be borne by other people in the economy."
It's not just the cost of higher taxes that needs to be factored
into the equation, he noted. To the degree that the government makes
policy that favors, say, vast construction of wind turbines throughout
the upper Midwest, the people doing those jobs will be drawn from
somewhere else, maybe even from more productive work. If policy leads
to the hiring of thousands of contractors to do energy efficiency, the
cost of building a new home or renovating your basement may go up
because many of the good construction workers are busy.
"As voters and citizens and readers, what we want to think about is
the big picture -- are we moving in the right direction when it comes to
environmental policy?" Roberts says. Put another way, are we spending
enough money today to head off the threat of global warming in the
future? Because if anyone tells you that we can deal with climate
change at no cost, they probably shouldn’t be trusted.
Maybe that's what bothers me about the green jobs ads. They're like
political campaign ads. They promise something for nothing. They treat
the voters like children. They're emotional and not educational. And
they're not helping to build a movement around climate change.
Other than that, they're fine.
And I do hope they work.
Ironworker image CC licensed by Flickr user Paul Keleher.
