Having been in the grip of a democrat Governor and legislature here in Colorado, we've heard all too much about the wonders of the green energy economy they are supposedly building.

This article, California's Green Nightmare, lays out why many are now waking up to the real costs to the economy that this rush to artificially create a green economy imposes on California.

Quote:It's hard to know where the fairy tale of "green jobs" first came from. It was probably a clever marketing scheme by radical environmentalists who realized that their anti-growth climate change agenda wasn't going to sell among the American electorate if workers realized how many jobs would be eviscerated by the new taxes and regulation. So, from somewhere out of Madison Avenue or K Street, the left devised the green jobs story line: we can impose a $1 trillion new tax on the U.S. economy over the next decade, and it will save jobs, as hundreds of thousands of Americans begin assembling windmills and solar paneling.

If we want to see how green policies work in the real world, we don't have to look any further than America's left coast. California has become the poster child of green jobs. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger boasted in his 2007 State of the State Address that "California has taken the leadership in moving the entire country beyond debate and denial [on global warming] to action. As goes California, so goes the nation."

He's right. California is the nation's laboratory in green job initiatives of the type that so many politicians in Washington, D.C., and the states see as America's economic passport to the future. The Golden State was first in the nation in renewable energy standards, it is the home of the most stringent cap and trade legislation (called AB 32) to reduce carbon emissions, and it has poured hundreds of millions of state tax dollars into renewable energy research.

So where are all the green jobs? A new 2010 study by the University of California-Berkeley comes to the sobering conclusion that "the green economy accounts for just 1 percent of California's jobs." That's right: of the roughly 15 million California workers, only about 159,000 have green jobs (and this was an expansive definition of green jobs, including trash sorters at the dumpsters). That same study did find that green employment is "growing about 50 percent faster than the economy overall." But that's mostly a reflection of anemic job generation in California's industrial base, and not a sign that green jobs are going to sprout all over the state like avocado plants.

I'm not against green energy - but it must be economically feasible and pay for itself, which of course it isn't at this time. Instead, we are force fed a diet of fees, taxes, etc. to prop it up. In essence, gov't once again picking winners and losers with our tax money.

Quote:The whole fight of jobs versus greens comes to a climax in November, when voters will decide on a ballot initiative to suspend the state's global warming law until unemployment falls back to 5.5 percent. The initiative is polling well, but green groups around the country are raising millions of dollars to defeat the measure. This is Waterloo for the Green Movement. If California rejects expensive job-killing remedies to climate change, other states will surely follow. California, ironically, could be the state that says, "Whoa: jobs first."

It would sure be nice if California led the nation in a direction that I could, for once, support.

California's Green Nightmare

Pray to the GOD San Andreas.

(10-11-2010 03:51 PM)MileHighBronco Wrote:  As goes California, so goes the nation."

True. That why more sensible minds have come up with Prop 23.

I could support paying a couple extra bucks to employ out of work liberals as trash sorters....