Dan Hannan on the Green Jobs Fallacy

In just one minute Conservative MEP Dan Hannan manages to destroy the myth of green jobs:

NYC pension funds in the hands of Al Gore - probably not very smart

If I were a present or future New York City pensioner, this piece of news would definitively not cheer me up:  

Embattled city Comptroller John Liu has delivered a $16.56 million contract to the former vice president's environmentally-friendly investment firm, Generation Investment Management, to help manage hundreds of millions of dollars in city pension funds, the New York Post has learned. 

The Comptroller's Office had previously awarded Gore's firm $12.8 million in pension-fund business under Liu's predecessor, Bill Thompson. 

Since 2009, state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli has approved $6 million in contracts to the firm, co-founded and chaired by Gore. Generation now manages nearly a half-billion dollars of state pension-fund investments, records show. 

Bill Gunderson, the owner of Gunderson Capital Management, is - rightly - not impressed by Al Gore´s "green" business or green investments in general: 

I'm sorry if I am as skeptical of Al's financial acumen as I am of his meteorological expertise. But green investments are terrible performers.

More than a year ago I told my clients and readers to 'sell everything under the sun.' I shorted First Solar, America's largest solar manufacturer.

The stock was at $120. Today is at $14.

Line 'em up: The green energy cars, green battery companies, green solar, green wind, green you name it: They are toxic to a portfolio. Unless of course you short them.

Four years ago, the Solar Index -- TAN -- was $307 a share. Today is is $19.

The Wind Index was $31 a share. Today it is $6.

Vestas Wind was $25 in 2009. Today is $1.70.

The list of lousy green stocks is just about the closest thing we have to an infinite renewable resource.

Curious how almost all of investments in green energy that Al would make for public employees require public subsidies and regulatory relief from the same people who are investing in the technology.

These are also the people who issue the numbers on Green Job growth. If you drive a bus, you have a green job. If you push a broom at the bus station, you have a green job. If you type a memo to the bus drive, you have a green job.

Remember that the next time some green broker tells you about the growth in the hundreds of thousands of green jobs in this country.

Months before President Obama made his now infamous visit to Solyndra, I wrote about how Solyndra was 'not a going concern' in several papers throughout the country.

A lot of people in the investment business knew it. If any reporters did, they did not see fit to share it with us. Maybe they were in it for the long term.

But the money still poured in.

That is green investing: If it feels good, do it. If you can brag about it at a dinner party, tell your broker to buy it. If Al Gore likes it, that's all you need to know.

But if your state pension fund actually needs the money, don't.

Read the entire article here

New study promises "hundreds of millions" of new green jobs

"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:

That research finds that 48 million ‘green and decent' jobs would be created if just 12 countries participated over the next five years.

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". 

Reality check: 

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.