17 comments on Spitzer Promotes Clean Energy, Minus Ethanol
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Well, as a friend who was an economics grad students used to say when I was in college, and the President of the day would spout about JOBS, "Here's my JOBS program: all farm machinery shall be outlawed. It will be very dangerous and miserable to start doing all that back-breaking and hazardous work with animals and by hand again, but it will make lots and lots and lots of JOBS. Any takers?"
Of course not. So when an ambitious, grandstanding politician - and Spitzer is second to no one on Earth in that respect - spouts off about JOBS, it's time for anyone who wants people to be able to live decent lives (which BTW leaves out each and every person who promotes the fatuous notion that going backwards to earlier times would be a great idea) to run hard in the opposite direction.
Despite the fact that everyone needs one, JOBS are mainly a COST of living, NOT a benefit. Which is why there were no takers for my friend's JOBS program.
Now there are real issues. One is the distribution of jobs and the existence of plenty of jobs that pay miserably simply because no one would care much if they went undone. Another is a sometimes fierce refusal to get the education or training needed to make it worth anyone else's while to pay oneself anything. People in old de-industrializing regions like the Mohawk Valley or Detroit, whose parents got a marvelous but unsustainable free ride in the transitory frenzy of unskilled manufacturing activity that followed World War II, tend to be especially self-delusional about this matter.
But quantity is not an issue. One of the USA's serious social problems is that there are already far too many unproductive JOBS wasting far too many hours of irreplaceable time. This is well attested to by vast and ever-growing piles of social literature lamenting the overworked American and the social ills that accompany him and her. And it's one more excellent reason to beware of politicians spouting about JOBS.
Spitzer is not just talking about jobs, he is talking about well paying jobs. I don't see how your story about your friend has much relevance to the issue here.
Beyond that, it is essential here to be talking about jobs in the context of conservation, renewables, and, incidentally, tackling the problem of global warming. People like Cheney poo poo conservation as anathema to the American way of life with no value. Those who fear attacking global warming advance the notion that tackling warming cuts jobs and cuts GDP. Spitzer is proposing an antidote to this attitude.
I read Spitzer's speach and it looks like a good start. However he doesnot see the Peak Oil message, merely the Global Warming message - so he is still trying to GROW NY by adding population and increasing total Electricity comsumption 15% with new power plants, even if he is trying to reduce individual consuption. I give him a 'C' for being only half way there.
One day he will realize we have no more fuel,so there is no reason to build more power plants. There is reason to make existing power plants more efficient while reducing emissions simply because there is less fuel and it is higher priced all of the time.
I thought it was relevant because these artificially produced jobs almost always (1) turn out to be ill paid rubbish in the end, once the fine words of the original speech are long-forgotten, or else (2) turn out - like "ethanol" - to be highly subsidized monsters that pay a few people well at the expense of taxing others more and generally dragging the economy for no useful purpose.
IOW, no matter how you slice it, government make-work is government make-work, and the last thing the overworked American needs is more artificially mandated make-work. After all, Spitzer wouldn't be able to advertise the JOBS he's "creating" unless what he's proposing is more labor-intensive than what came before - and that's virtually NEVER progress.