Here’s a meme to look out for in the coming weeks and months as the administration and Congress push major environment and energy reforms. Every new green job, you’ll be told, comes at the cost of more than two non-green jobs–it happened in Spain, you see, and even a trained Spanish economist says so.
Michelle Bachmann’s already on the case.
But, as with the MIT study she and other Republicans have been torturing for weeks, there’s really not a whole lot to this claim. As the noted Earth Day-enthusiasts at the Wall Street Journal note, the Spanish study “doesn’t actually identify those jobs allegedly destroyed by renewable-energy spending.”
What the study actually says is that government spending on renewable energy is less than half as efficient at job creation as private-sector spending. Specifically, each green job required on average 571,000 euros, compared with 259,000 euros in “average capital per worker” in the rest of the economy.
The study is about government spending, and, specifically, about the fact that, in Spain, government spending has created fewer jobs when the money is committed to clean energy than it has when outlaid directly to private parties. It’s stimulus–just not as stimulative as spending on “non-green jobs.”
Keep in mind, too, that the report was written by the president of Fundacion de Juan Mariana–a libertarian think tank–who’s also a fellow of the Center for New Europe–another libertarian think tank that in the past has enjoyed funding from Exxon Mobil. So it’s not as if the report was untainted to begin with. But if you’re Michelle Bachmann you never let an opportunity to say a study says things it doesn’t really say.
