Green jobs disappear

Paul Homewood has discovered, via an FOI request, that the government has decided to quietly shelve its green jobs dataset. Paul surmises, surely correctly, that the promised green jobs have not actually materialised.

I have often noted that to the extent that green jobs are created, the related technologies will be expensive. Mr Davey's great economic breakthrough is to burden the country with technologies that are both expensive, disfunctional, and do not actually create much employment at all.

He has broken the mould.

Comments

[GrantB]

Unfortunately you don't have Senate estimate committees in the UK. Here is Senator Joyce in 2009 questioning Mr Comley, a bureaucrat from the (now defunct) Department of Climate Change, who explains exactly what a green job is -

ACTING CHAIR —France has the lowest emissions in Europe but it has nuclear power.

Senator JOYCE —Eighty per cent of the power in France comes from nuclear power. What exactly is a ‘green’ job?

Mr Comley —To repeat what I said earlier, there are two clusters of what you might think of as green jobs. There are jobs that previously have not existed in the economy in totality related to green or you are increasing the numbers of those.

Senator JOYCE —What do you define as green? Does that mean mowing the lawn? What is a green job?

Mr Comley —If I may finish the observation, the second cluster is how current jobs evolve over time to take into account better environmental outcomes in conducting those jobs. As I said before, you may have an electrician who in the past has had skills in installing a range of appliances but might not have thought about energy management systems to the same extent or the way in which they might consult with original building designers or with architects about trying to optimise the way that you use energy for the purposes of reducing the environmental footprint. They are included in the concept of what green or environmentally conscious jobs are.

Senator JOYCE —I cannot be bothered to ask why we call them green jobs, but what colour job is an electrician working at a coal plant?

Mr Comley —I come back to my earlier observation: it is not about whether it is a green job or not, it is about the mix of tasks you undertake.

Senator JOYCE —I just want to know what colour job is an electrician working at a coal plant.

Mr Comley —I am not sure there is a way of answering that. The point is that the nature of jobs in the economy, including the ratio of what you do in a particular job, will change as we build in greater environmental considerations in each of those jobs.

Senator JOYCE —This whole thing swings on these mythical green jobs. I just want to know what a green job is. What colour is an electrician working in a coal plant? What colour is an electrician working in a school? When does a job become the colour screen?

Mr Livingston —Senator, I will give you an example. We have just had an application from a coal fired power station in the Hunter Valley to put in a solar boiler to put heat into their boiler. So if they are working on a solar boiler within a coal fired plant they should get RECs.

Senator JOYCE —Are they green, or some other colour?

Mr Livingston —The question does not arise, because you are doing both jobs.

Senator JOYCE —So they are a mix of colours?

ACTING CHAIR —They are multicoloured. Senator Joyce, at this point we will have to move on.

Senator JOYCE —Can I just ask one other question.

ACTING CHAIR —We are going to finish at 11.40 am so that Hansard can have a break.

Senator JOYCE —Okay. The whole thing is bloody ridiculous!

[Phillip Bratby]

Grant: That is hilarious. A script from an unshown episode of Yes Minister, with name changes.

[Athelstan.]

Green Sand,

:o) !

GrantB,

An extraordinary exchange and - how does one describe mythical wee green beasties conjured out of ectoplasm?

[hunter]

How does something that never existed disappear?
Meanwhile the American Secretary of State is doing his best to play climate fear like a fiddle. Nero played better fiddle than Kerry plays climate.

[ptw]

So we were lied to when we needed to buy in into the scam?
And who's responsible for the failed setup of the business case and policy decision decorum ??

No-one, like always. They do not do accountability in high value nannystate service. Accountability and providing value Thats for the sole employer who has to make sure he makes no error in his tax returns or he is immediately a "criminal"

[ptw]

ay heart is the ignorance as to what it means "to create a new job"

People want energy and got this energy with , say, X people=jobs, until "green thinking" started.
If you deliver this same energy now with X+1000 jobs, then you have not created 1000 jobs. Rather you have taxed the economy and probably destroyed 1000jobs for imposing 1000 nonsensical jobs.

New jobs are created where new services and products are created, that people want to buy.
Wealth will pay for these jobs then, initially, and a cycle of wealth will sustain then the jobs.

This does not happen with any of the bolshevik plans, as wealth is not invested but stolen.

Now I feel sympathy with the idea that it is always the same that have the wealth, and this is the discussion as to why we always only tax income and risk taking and NEVER wealth..That is a valid discussion. Taxing wealth does not destroy jobs as wealth will feel compelled to go for risk taking then, thereby even creating more jobs,

[tom0mason]

Maybe they should have read the the old piece in Environmental Justice site back in 2011.
The authors Edgardo Lander who is one of the leading thinkers and writers on the left in Venezuela, both supportive and constructively critical of the Venezuelan revolution under Chavez. He is actively involved in social movements in the Americas that defeated the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA).
He wrote -

In all its hundreds of pages, the UNEP report "Towards a Green Economy" (2011) presents many possibilities for altering patterns of production, industry, agriculture, the organisation of cities, construction systems, transport. It also brings together a wide range of rich experiences in alternative technology, renewable energy and new regulatory regimes that exist in different parts of the world. This shows that there are many processes around the world today seeking alternatives to the destructive logic of the hegemonic models of production and consumption. This should be recognised as an important contribution made by the report to debates on alternatives.
...
Corresponding to the superficial approach that characterises most documents of this kind, this report completely ignores all the most controversial issues, creating a fictional world that does not operate responding to powerful interests, but on the idea of political leaders building consensus for the benefit of all...

http://www.tni.org/report/green-economy-wolf-sheeps-clothing

Maybe this wolf in sheeps clothing wants a more authoritarian world government, or maybe not...