As the science of alarmist AGW fades, one of the backup justifications for various actions on climate in Australia and globally is a new clean energy industry providing ‘green’ jobs. The economics of this are simply fradulent:
An Economist’s Look at Mythical Man-Made Global Warming (AGW)
By Raymond Richman, 10/2/2011
“… Promoters of wind and solar farms and bio-energy plants found they needed to put up very little of their own money. Huge grants and tax savings were offered by state and local governments. And not only in the US but world-wide. A Spanish economist, Professor Gabriel Calzado Alvarez, blew a whistle. According to his research, for every job created in solar and wind farms, 2.2 jobs were lost in the private sector. Spain retrenched and just in time or we would be facing the collapse of her economy and Greece’s. And the latest calamity, the bankruptcy of Solyndra leaving the US government holding the bag for some $535 million in guaranteed loans.
Here in the US, the federal government approved loan guarantees for hundreds of wind and solar farms. It made a $175 million loan guarantee to a Spanish company Abengoa Solar Inc. to construct Solana, a 250-megawatt, concentrated solar power (CSP) facility located near Gila Bend, Arizona. The Energy Department has closed a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for BrightSource Energy’s 370-megawatt Ivanpah project now under construction on federal land in the Mojave Desert in California as well as a $1.2 billion loan guarantee for SunPower’s 250-megawatt photovoltaic California Valley Solar Ranch. In February, a 290-megawatt photovoltaic power plant being built by NRG Solar, a unit of NRG Energy, in Arizona obtained a $967 million federal loan guarantee. All of these plants received additional subsidies from the states and federal government.
As an economist, I am hard-pressed to describe the economic system that these plants represent. I think of Hitler and Goering, of Mussolini, of Lenin’s New Economic Plan, and of China. It is a mixture of socialism and capitalism. It is a capitalism with no private risks for all practical purposes. I think of Pres. Obama’s intervention in the bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler. It needs a name. State capitalism, or closer to the administration’s heart, perhaps social-capitalism. ”
Comment:
I must stress that the author does not raise the comparison with Hitler and the others gratuitously for their roles as mass murderers, but for their corrupted economic models of state capitalism, where the state directs and uses private enterprise for grand visions and political objectives with well known results. We do not want to be following these footsteps.
