Don't Pretend Green Jobs will Save Us

Australians have been told it is time to call out Greens Party leader, Bob Brown, for his wild claims that whacking the country with a huge carbon tax will create a "green jobs revolution". Green policies in fact tend to kill jobs, not create them, not least by diverting huge amounts of taxes from more productive parts of the economy.

Americans have seen the Obama Administration channeled 90 billion of the 870 billion dollar stimulus package towards the new Green Economy. The hope was that a national move from fossil energy to green energy would not only be good, long term, for the environment, but that transition could also be a jobs driver, which would help resuscitate the overall economy.

But two years into Obama's administration, the White House has reported it's helped create 224,500 green jobs, far short of the 5 million it had openly predicted. That's $400,000 of government help for each green job. Now economists are saying that Obama's promise at the recent Cancun Climate Conference to reduce to 60% the United States' emissions by 2030 will actually subvert the country's economic productivity to 1905 levels! At that time household electrical needs were mainly for lighting. Pure crazy!

Even then, that's cheaper than the green jobs 'created' by Spain's mad flirtation with green power, that's brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy. A study calculates that since 2000 Spain $1.03 million to create each green job, including subsidies of more than $1.8 million per wind industry job! I have personally seen the vast stretches of windfarms across southern Spain. The study also calculates that programs creating those jobs also resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs destroyed for every green job. What a mess watermelons can get you in!

The Way I See It....Resources Minister Martin Ferguson has rightly accused the Australian Greens of seeking to derail mining approval processes. He has vowed he will not be ''intimidated" into putting politics ahead of jobs and any other Labor economic development projects. He was relating to Bob Brown description of the proposed liquefied natural gas processing plant in Western Australia as a "blight" on the Kimberley landscape disregarding that the project would create thousands of jobs and guarantee $1.5 billion to the surrounding Aboriginal communities. Being in bed with Julia Gillard's minority government, the Greens will continue to flex their voting muscle. Hopefully their cockamamie policies will be held in check.