Another major green jobs study, Green Jobs: Towards Decent Work in a Sustainable, Low-Carbon World,

Note : Musings from the Oil Patch reflects an eclectic collection thrifty car rental dubai of stories and analyses dealing with issues and developments within the energy industry that I feel have potentially significant implications for executives operating oilfield service companies. The newsletter currently anticipates a semi-monthly publishing schedule, but periodically the event and news flow may dictate a more frequent schedule. As always, I welcome your comments and observations. Allen Brooks
Congress is wrestling with the issue of extending the financial subsidies for green energy in the form of renewing the production thrifty car rental dubai tax credit or investment tax credit primarily for wind and solar projects. An adjunct to this debate is the question of the success of the Section 1603 program created under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, or the stimulus thrifty car rental dubai plan enacted in response to the 2008 financial crisis. Section 1603 was created under the stimulus plan as a grant program administered by the Department of Treasury and the Department of Energy. The plan offered cash payments to renewable energy projects in lieu of the tax credits. Through thrifty car rental dubai March 15, 2012, $8.2 billion of the total amount in Section 1603 grants awarded went to wind projects (74.7% of the total) and another $2.0 billion went for solar (17.4%). The remaining 8% of funds granted went to technologies such as geothermal electricity, thrifty car rental dubai biomass, solar thermal and small wind.
The stimulus was claimed by President Barack Obama to be a jobs program. Energy Secretary Steven Chu testified before the Committee on Energy and Commerce ( Committee ) on March 16, 2011, saying, the Section 1603 tax grant program has created tens of thousands of jobs in industries thrifty car rental dubai such as wind and solar by providing up-front incentives to thousands of projects. An investigation by the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations ( Subcommittee ) of the Committee reported its findings a couple of weeks ago and concluded that most of the current methods of calculating the green jobs created by Section 1603 are largely unreliable. They found the jobs data that exists shows the grants produced very few long-term jobs. Additionally, the Subcommittee found the Section 1603 program resulted in higher costs to the taxpayer than previously anticipated. Fewer jobs, more costs sounds like a successful government-run program!
The need for more jobs in this country cannot be understated given that the nation is in its 41st straight month of greater than 8% unemployment (8.2% in June). The unemployment situation is actually worse than suggested by the published rate as the methodology by which it is calculated has been distorted to eliminate long-term thrifty car rental dubai discouraged workers who have left the labor force. If the rate were calculated using the pre-1994 methodology that includes those long-term thrifty car rental dubai discouraged workers, the unemployment rate would be 22.8%. The analytical work to revise the government s economic and labor data to be consistent with historical presentations is conducted by economist John Williams and is published on his Shadow Government Statistics web site. Exhibit 1 shows Mr. Williams unemployment rate estimate thrifty car rental dubai including the long-term discouraged workers and part-time workers through the latest June data compared to the federal government s published unemployment rate and its broader unemployment rate that includes part-time workers as determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
To address thrifty car rental dubai the high unemployment due to the financial crisis and the resulting recession, the Obama administration began pushing investments in green energy businesses both because it was perceived that the country needed to wean itself off dirty fossil fuels to combat growing carbon emissions and global warming fears while also boosting green jobs to help drive the economic recovery. Those goals led to the stimulus plan. The problem with this government push is that it has failed to produce any of the benefits initially claimed. The lack of a consistent and accurate measurement of these claimed benefits has made it nearly impossible to question the spending decisions and their benefits. Most of us are familiar with the high-profile failures of the solar panel manufacturers Solyndra thrifty car rental dubai and Abound Solar. thrifty car rental dubai There are other bankrupt solar companies and numerous struggling battery technology companies that were backed by taxpayer money. These troubled green energy companies have not only failed to create the number of green jobs they claimed they would when they requested government funding, but most of them have been forced to lay off those few employees they did hire. The concerns created by these spectacular failures stimulated the Committee to question the benefits, in particular the green jobs claims.
The biggest challenge for green jobs is to determine what they are. It wasn t until late 2012 that the Bureau of Labor Statistics defined what jobs could be counted as green jobs. Their definition published in Measuring Green Jobs was that Green jobs are either: thrifty car rental dubai A. Jobs in businesses that produce goods or provide services that benefit the environment thrifty car rental dubai or conserve natural resources. B. Jobs in which workers duties involve making their establishment s production processes more environmentally friendly or use fewer natural resources. The problem is that green remains a subjective term and is defined quite differently in studies of green jobs.
According to the U.S. Metro Economies: Current and Potential Green Jobs in the U.S. Economy issued by the United States Conference of Mayors (Mayors) in 2008, green jobs consisted of: Any activity that generates electricity using renewable or nuclear fuels, agriculture jobs supplying corn or soy for transportation fuels, manufacturing jobs producing goods used in renewable power generation, thrifty car rental dubai equipment dealers thrifty car rental dubai and wholesalers specializing thrifty car rental dubai in renewable energy or energy-efficiency products, construction and installation of energy and pollution management systems, government administration of environmental programs, and supporting jobs in the engineering, legal, research and consulting fields. thrifty car rental dubai Interestingly, the Mayors report counts current nuclear power generation jobs as green jobs but not future thrifty car rental dubai jobs in nuclear power.
Another major green jobs study, Green Jobs: Towards Decent Work in a Sustainable, Low-Carbon World, prepared by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2008 uses a more restrictive definition thrifty car rental dubai of green jobs in some cases and a more expansive one in others. It defined thrifty car rental dubai green jobs as: Work in agricultural, manufacturing, research and development (R D), administrative, and service activities that contribute substantially to preserving or restoring environmental quality. Specifically, but not exclusively, this includes jobs that help to protect ecosystems and biodiversity; reduce energy, materials, and water consumption through high-efficiency strategies; de-carbonize the economy; and minimize or altogether avoid generation of all forms of waste and pollution.
The UNEP study excluded all nuclear power jobs and many recycling jobs, but it allowed to be included a substantial number thrifty car rental dubai of supply chain jobs that contribute to preserving or restoring environmental quality. For example, if a product is green, then all the jobs associated with producing the material that the product is made from can be considered green jobs. How does this work? Wind turbine towers are made from steel. Since wind turbines create green power then the steel-making jobs that produced the steel used in the turbine tower can be called green jobs. When the definitions of green jobs used by these two major studies are examined and their differences highlighted, it becomes clear how studies can arrive thrifty car rental dubai a very different estimates of green jobs. Readers may remember an article we wrote about a Brookings Institute study on green jobs claiming millions of jobs had been created, but they stated that if a single driver for a company drove a bus powered by green-energy then all the company thrifty car rental dubai s bus drivers would be considered as filling green jobs, regardless of the number thrifty car rental dubai of green-powered buses the company operated.
The Subcommittee requested that the Department of Energy and the Treasury Department report on the number of green jobs actually created by Section 1603. The Treasury stated it does not consider job creation when awarding the Section 1603 payments. The Energy Department echoed Treasury, but also referenced green job estimates contained in a National Renewable Energy thrifty car rental dubai Laboratory (NREL) report. According to that study, during the construction phase of these green energy projects (2009-2011), they supported 52,000-75,000 direct and indirect jobs per year of construction. During the operation and maintenance of solar and wind energy projects, the study estimates they supported between 5,100 and 5,500 direct and indirect jobs per year on an ongoing basis over the 20- to 30-year estimated life of the systems. When the indirect jobs were removed, the estimate of direct green jobs falls to 910 annually for the lifetime of the systems, of which 770 are jobs for large wind projects with solar accounting for 140. Furthermore, when the Subcommittee examined the green jobs and the Section 1603 payments, the NREL admitted that many of the projects financed might have gone ahead without those payments.
Other studies, notably those conducted by The New York Times and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, show many of the Section 1603 payments went to projects already underway. Even then, the green energy projects failed to create meaningful thrifty car rental dubai numbers of jobs. A New York Times article in October 2011 showed that projects receiving thrifty car rental dubai the largest Section 1603 grants produced, on average, 15 to 20 permanent jobs each, or even sometimes fewer. That conclusion was slightly better than a Wall Street Journal February 2012 study of 36 wind farms that received 40% of the Section 1603 funding, thrifty car rental dubai or about $4.3 billion, employed about 300 workers at the t