"We can create 48 million green and decent jobs over
five years in just 12 countries. Imagine what we can
do in 24 countries, imagine in 50 countries, how
many hundreds of millions of jobs that would create".
Sharan Burrow, General Secretary,
International Trade Union Confederation.
"Hundreds of millions" of green jobs could be created if only governments would invest 2% of GDP in the green economy, according to a new International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) study:
24 million jobs could be created in the US, Germany and Australia, and 18 million jobs in Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa.
"Imagine what we can do in 24 countries, imagine in 50 countries, how many hundreds of millions of jobs that would create," says the report.
Sounds like great news. However, a look at how ITUC has arrived at these fantastic job numbers, may dampen the initial enthusiasm:
"The number of jobs quantified that could be created or transformed into green and
decent jobs under green investment scenarios were identified through quantitative
simulations."
Well, we all know what warmist climate modellers have been able to create with their simulations. The ITUC researchers appear to have used the same creative simulation techniques in order to achieve these "hundreds of millions" of new green jobs.
President Obama´s "jobs pledge" demonstrates according to the ITUC study "how policies, regulation and investment can drive investment into the greeen economy and create jobs".
Out Of Work: When they voted for Barack Obama in 2008, some Americans believed his promise of a green economy bursting with jobs. Some still do. Unfortunately, there's this little matter of reality.
While campaigning four years ago, Sen. Barack Obama promised that a $150 billion in government spending on renewable energy projects would create 5 million green-collar jobs over 10 years. Near the end of this administration's first year in office, Vice President Joe Biden promised 722,000 green jobs would be generated by the stimulus. A green-jobs czar was even appointed.
So what's happened?
Well, the jobless rate is still above 8% and the number of workers no longer in the labor force is nearly 88 million, up almost 10 million from the day this president entered the White House.
Obama could have boosted job growth by approving the Keystone XL pipeline and opening more federal tracts to oil and gas drilling. But he didn't. Instead he chose to stay on the green-collar route, which has yielded virtually nothing in the way of jobs.
Last summer the New York Times reported that "federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed." More recently, an analysis by Reuters found that "the millions of 'green jobs' Obama promised have been slow to sprout."
Within the stimulus package there's a $500 million job-training program that "has so far helped fewer than 20,000 people find work, far short of its goal." Reuters reported last week that the program's initial results "were so poor that the Labor Department's inspector general recommended last fall that the agency should return the $327 million that remained unspent."
Meantime, the wind industry "has shed 10,000 jobs since 2009," said Reuters, and renewable and alternative energy companies that the government has shown favor to keep shutting down or filing for bankruptcy.
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