Tens of millions of new jobs can be created around the world in the next two decades if green policies are put in place to switch the high-carbon economy to low-carbon, the UN has said.
Between 15m and 60m additional jobs are likely, according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep). These are net gains in employment for the world economy, taking into account any job losses in high-carbon industries that fail to transform.
Sigh
. The number of jobs created is the expense of your plans. Because the people in those jobs are not doing something else. Thus we lose the product of whatever else it is that they could be doing.
Yes, yes, all the caveats: it still might be worth doing and all that. But the jobs themselves are costs, not benefits as you are touting.
Here’s the link ..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/31/switching-green-economy-jobs-un
It reads like a Daily Mash article.
Tens of thousands of jobs could be created in the weaving industry by smashing up all the looms, claims a report out today. Meanwhile,thea study by the Institute of Advanced Nostalgia asserts that the UK’s long term decline in agricultural employment could be reversed by using more organic methods such as hand weeding the wheat crop and gathering and winnowing by hand. This would reduce carbon emissions by 90% by eliminating the need for carbon-hungry tractors and combine harvesters.
“mashing up all the looms”
Not even necessary.
If jobs are the solution, just let the government hire thousands or millions of people.
Doesn’t matter what they do. Or if they do anything.
Give them “jobs” and voila – the solution is achieved.
Oh, you say, the public will still have to pay for this solution? Well, yeah. What’s yer point?
The greenie sub-text is showing through. Creating jobs is shorthand for the de-industrialization of the world by removing highly efficient mechanisation and going back to intensive manual work. Power hungry, efficient production will be rendered impossible because ‘renewable’ energy is just too unreliable/expensive.
To be fair to Keynes, loathe as I am to do so, even he recognised that jobs have different values, via his use of hypothetical “wage-units”. Nowadays economics has become so degraded that they blithely talk simply in job numbers in the aggregate, without even caring whether the jobs are low value or high value.
You can in principle at least increase employment numbers in the aggregate by replacing smaller numbers of high value jobs with larger numbers of low value jobs. If you don’t care about the total wage value. 10 people earning (and thus generating at least) 50k replaced by 20 people earning 10k certainly increases your “employment” statistic. Doesn’t do much for your economy though.
This, it seems to me, is the real Green Economic Revolution. You replace engineers with rubbish sorters.