Biden’s Green New Deal: A Recipe for Failure

PART 1

[This is Part 1 of a 2-part essay on the impact that Biden’s Green New Deal is likely to have on U.S. economic performance, job creation and energy security. Part 2 is available here.]

• Biden’s energy and climate plans are just a reprise of Obama green energy failure, but on steroids
• Biden’s focus on phasing out fossil fuel has already destroyed thousands of high-paying union jobs without any replacement job creation anywhere
• Green energy is a very low-productivity energy source that saps the main engine of economic growth
• Obama’s green energy program helped drive down productivity to one of the lowest levels in the post-War era
• Massive switchover to EVs will merely displace conventional auto sales offering no net economic advantage
• EVs are likely to involve higher levels of foreign content, worsening trade and current account deficits
• Mandated investments in EV charging networks will siphon resources to create very low-productivity infrastructure that is less efficient, more resource-intensive, and more time-consuming
• Biden’s Green New Deal is likely to re-launch the ridiculous green jobs counting frenzy that became a national pastime during the Obama years
• Existing counts of green energy jobs by green activist groups bear little or no relationship to BLS job counts or to the value of green energy output
• Worker productivity degradation is exemplified by solar energy which requires 30 times more and wind energy which requires 5 times more workers per unit of energy produced than natural gas
• Green jobs creation comes at staggering price tags, often tens of millions of dollars in government support per full time job created
• Unionization rates among green jobs occupational classifications are among the lowest of industrial workers in the U.S.
• The likelihood that Biden can deliver on his promise to create millions of unionized green energy jobs is very low
• Deficit spending to jump-start a green energy program would be economically depressing in a variety of ways that include crowding out private sector investment, increasing the sovereign debt load, undermining the value of the U.S. dollar, boosting interest rates, spurring inflation, reducing productivity, worsening the balance of trade and current account deficits, driving energy prices higher, making industry less competitive, curtailing economic growth, lowering personal incomes, and eroding the country’s energy security

Introduction

Joe Biden campaigned on a promise to unleash a tsunami of debt-fueled deficit spending whose total price tag would amount to $5 trillion to implement his Green New Deal. As alert observers well know, there wasn’t a single syllable of originality involved in his program. It was a word-for-word reprise of the failed Obama green energy-climate program distinguished only by its order-of-magnitude increase in spending scope and level of hysterical amplitude. This essay will examine economic, workforce and energy output data to show how Biden’s program is indistinguishable from Obama’s, why Obama’s program was such a colossal failure, and why Biden’s program will also fail even more catastrophically.

In his inauguration address, Biden spoke about his unique hearing ability. “A cry for survival comes from the planet itself. A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear,” he proclaimed. Biden assured the world it was “a climate in crisis.” Never mind that this “cry” is one that, like the voices in their heads telling them the 2016 election was stolen but the 2020 election was not, can only be heard by a very select few people.

Biden spoke of a “battle to save our planet by getting climate under control,” in his victory speech immediately after the election. Noticeably absent in those two seminal speeches was any concrete plan to create high-wage jobs, grow personal and household incomes, or boost output of farms, factories and businesses. In fact, all the signs pointed to a high likelihood of exactly the opposite outcome occurring. And never mind that to sell his plan, he’d need to assure Americans that a devastating freeze in Texas that knocked out windmills and forced power and water offline for days on end was yet another proof point of global warming, a painful reminder that America needed his Green New Deal to forestall the runaway atmospheric heating that was causing people to freeze to death in their homes.

Everything pertaining to economic and energy policy from the prior administration needed to change. That was the administration that had, for the first time since 1957, empowered the U.S. to generate more primary energy than the nation had consumed, that had permitted the country to become petroleum self-sufficient on a volumetric basis for the first time since prior to World War II, that had increased the monthly pace of full time job creation among women during the pre-pandemic period by 70% compared to the last 4 years of the Obama administration, that had boosted the rate of average annual payroll wage growth by 44% over that same time frame, that had posted the lowest rate of unemployment in more than 50 years, that had boosted the annual pace of industrial production by a factor of 13 (i.e. 1,302%) from the prior 4 years, that increased average monthly personal income growth by 80% and had doubled monthly per capita personal income growth, that restored a robust 4.1% annual rate of new factory order growth after a 4 year period of decline, that had seen the monthly rate of high-wage goods-producing (mining, construction, manufacturing) job creation increase by 35.2%, that had witnessed a 25% reduction in food stamp enrollment and a 27% reduction in benefits payout from the Obama caseload still lingering 4 years after the recession had ended, etc.

The Biden agenda was clear: All that had to change. And judging by Biden’s rhetoric thus far, it seems highly likely it all will change.

Biden Central Planning

The newly inaugurated president wasted no time reversing his predecessor’s job-creating energy policies. Within hours of being sworn in, Biden signed an executive order revoking the Keystone XL pipeline permit. That move resulted in the immediate loss of thousands of high-wage unionized construction and engineering jobs. The Keystone XL pipeline had become a curious touchstone issue among environmental activists, enduring an undeservedly long and torturous history prior to Biden’s apparent coup de grâce.

SOURCE: BLS Monthly Current Employment Statistics

Barack Obama was one of those activists. Despite the State Department having issued the first of its five final environmental impact statements in August 2011 granting approval to the proposal, the Obama administration repeatedly interfered to slow-walk it in a “defeat by delay” process. Obama would later issue a veto in hopes of killing the project, one of only 12 vetoes he’d issue during 8 years in office, after Congress voted overwhelmingly to approve the project in the Keystone XL Pipeline Approval Act.

Two months after Trump took office, he issued a permit by executive order after the State Department granted the last of its final approvals. A State Department study estimated the total impact of the KXL Pipeline from construction, extended supply chain and indirect or induced employment totaled 26,100 jobs. As union criticism mounts, thousands of union workers are thrown out of work, and Biden’s press spokesperson is heard offering only snarky answers to seriously-posed questions about where laid-off workers can go today to find green jobs, the administration begins its 10 million clean energy jobs tidal wave with a huge jobs deficit, serious union opposition and some really bad political optics.

In addition to the pipeline permit revocation, Biden announced an immediate moratorium on drilling permits on federal lands. Defenders of the measure hastened to point out that a moratorium was not an outright ban. The measure only covered a mere 90 days. But observers immediately recognized this as a rerun of Obama’s 180-day moratorium on outer continental shelf drilling in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Obama would later lift that moratorium. But, in its place, he would establish a set of onerous new regulations that acted as a de facto extension of the moratorium. Five months after the administration announced its lifting of the moratorium, the Interior Department had still not managed to approve a single new exploratory deep water drilling plan.

Biden had solemnly promised on multiple occasions during his campaign that he was “not banning fracking in Pennsylvania or anywhere else.” What could be more unequivocal? “I will not ban fracking. Period,” he said to a Dallas, Pennsylvania audience, adding “I will protect jobs in Pennsylvania.” So naturally, when it came time to protect jobs in Pennsylvania, Working-Class Joe abstained. When the Delaware River Basin Commission, ignoring the incontestable findings of the Obama EPA, voted to ban fracking, Biden punted. So yes, he didn’t exactly “ban” fracking and thereby destroy Pennsylvania jobs. He allowed others to do it for him.

It was familiar Obama style. Offer an endless series of meaningless platitudes about the need for new sources of energy or the importance of protecting jobs, but then do exactly the opposite. Despite his rhetoric, in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill Obama would cancel four lease sales in Alaska, ban both shallow and deep water drilling in the Gulf, lift the Gulf drilling ban but later impose a de facto moratorium by spiking the approval process, and open the Eastern Gulf, Atlantic, and Pacific coastal areas to drilling only to close them off again a few months later.

Close observers had also seen a similar pattern in Obama EPA rulemaking. In April 2010, Obama’s EPA issued “guidance” on a controversial coal mining technique called mountain-top removal. That was guidance, just a “recommendation.” But the agency then used that same “guidance” as its authority to shut down a coal mining operation in Logan County, West Virginia, a regulatory action that put 250 employees out of work. With nearly 50 years of high-level insider experience in government, Biden needed no education in political cynicism that his neophyte predecessor could never hope to master. Thus, a “temporary” moratorium on drilling provides absolutely no reassurance to those whose jobs are dependent on a robust “all of the above” energy policy. As we learned from bitter experience during the Obama years, all of the above means nothing below the surface.

John Kerry, Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, claims laid off pipeline workers can “go to work making the solar panels.” The obvious trouble is, those jobs Biden has killed are gone today while the ones he claims he’ll create are far off in the future, or may never materialize. Even if they do appear ― and there’s absolutely no certainty they will ― they’ll pay far less and likely occur in locales far from the high-paying union jobs he has now eliminated. Heather Richards of Energy & Environment News reports that:

“A union jobs retraining program for miners run since the 1990s in Pennsylvania and West Virginia has supported thousands of workers. But the average wage they earn after that program is about $14 an hour.

Those were workers that had been making as much as $82,000 per year, or $42.71 per hour for a 1,920-hour work year. But don’t let that bother you. NPR agrees workers will get far less pay, but they’ll be rewarded with more passion. Really, they actually said that. That will sure come in handy when it comes time to pay mortgage bills and put kids through college.

On his first day in office, Biden announced the U.S. would rejoin the Paris Climate Accord, a treaty that obligates some but by no means all signatory nations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Biden’s appointment of John Kerry, an aloof, condescending, private jet-traveling career politician, signals that he would effectively become the nation’s real Energy & Environment Secretary. The signs are not encouraging. Biden appears more intent on pleasing Fabian socialists of the European Union at the expense of American workers if Biden environment advisor Gina McCarthy’s rhetoric is to be believed.

And why shouldn’t it? It’s a certainty U.S. emissions cuts won’t be matched by the world’s largest emitter China or by India, the world’s third largest and most rapidly growing source. To honor these draconian commitments, deep cuts in the industrial workforce that will lead to a permanent loss of tens or even hundreds of thousands of high-wage, unionized, goods-producing jobs will need to be made.

A few days after inauguration, Biden promised to put the immense purchasing power of the federal government behind a plan to acquire a fleet of non-emitting electric vehicles, claiming the measure would lead to significant job gains. Needless to say, one need never be burdened with explaining why acquiring non-emitting cars will create loads of jobs while existing federal fleet vehicle purchases of conventional vehicles presumably would not. And never mind that the federal fleet averages about 6,000 miles per year. That is less than half the 13,476 annual mileage per vehicle the average private vehicle achieves. An NBER study of privately-owned EVs published in 2021 found the average annual mileage per vehicle was just 5,300 miles. Thus, the far higher acquisition price tags of EVs will have fewer miles to monetize their lower on-going operating cost making them far less economical than a conventional model choice would be for a typical motorist.

We also learned that Biden is planning to force American taxpayers to fund a nationwide electric vehicle (EV) charging network to induce consumer EV adoption. Some 500,000 EV chargers would be built and deployed by 2030. Like Soviet-era central planners, Biden has decided he can outthink consumer tastes and trends. We can hardly wait until he decides how many brands of washing machines or toothpaste consumers require. None of this bodes well for the American economy.

We’ll examine in detail how these programs have worked in the past and what impact they will likely have on jobs, productivity, economic growth, balance of trade, consumer prices and a host of other considerations.

Labor Productivity and Economic Growth

As noted above, Biden’s plan to revive the failed Obama green energy plan with an order of magnitude larger infusion of debt-fueled spending bodes poorly for long-term economic growth prospects. Forget the rhetoric about reviving the economy or empty promises to “Build Back Better” by employing borrowed money to incentivize costly energy sources that rely upon foreign-sourced components, energy output that must be heavily subsidized to be fed into highly regulated and distorted markets just to allow them to succeed. The plan is doomed.

There are two basic factors that contribute to long run economic growth. They are:

(1) increases in labor inputs from an increase in hours worked by an expanding labor pool, or

(2) technology advances that produce productivity improvement (an increase in value produced per hour worked).

That’s it. There is nothing else on offer as SOURCES of economic growth. All the other factors that we typically examine as components of economic output like personal consumption expenditures, business investments, trade surpluses, government expenditures and so forth are actually USES of growth.

Most economic growth comes from productivity improvements. As Chad Stone of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities testified in April 2017:

“Broadly speaking, there are two main sources of economic growth: growth in the size of the workforce and growth in the productivity (output per hour worked) of that workforce. Either can increase the overall size of the economy but only strong productivity growth can increase per capita GDP and income. Productivity growth allows people to achieve a higher material standard of living without having to work more hours or to enjoy the same material standard of living while spending fewer hours in the paid labor force.”

Within a month after inauguration day in 2009, Congress passed and Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), unleashing an estimated $831 billion flood of deficit spending into a still-contracting economy. A notable feature of the 2007-to-2009 recession that bill attempted to alleviate was the deep impact it had on job counts and hours worked compared to the deep recession in the early 1980s. Payroll employment had contracted 6.7% by February 2010 from its prior peak in January 2008. Meanwhile, during that same time, average weekly hours worked plunged from 34.4 to 33.8 due to a large loss of full time jobs and a corresponding partial replacement with part time work. When these two factors are combined, economy-wide employee hours worked had declined by 8.6% on an annualized basis.

By contrast, the deepest job count decline during the Carter-Reagan recessions was far milder. Parenthetically, the National Bureau of Economic Research counts 2 recessions over the 1980-to-1982 time period, but it’s entirely reasonable to view it as a single, torturous, long-duration contraction interrupted by a short 2-quarter growth spurt. The worst recorded jobs decline was only 2.4% even though the 1980s recession had seen the U3 unemployment rate soar to 10.85% and stay in double-digit territory for an agonizing 10 months. That compares to the Bush-Obama recession where U3 unemployment hit just 10% ― actually 9.982833% if anyone’s keeping score ― and do so for only one single month.

Green Energy: A Recipe for Productivity Erosion

Why is this important and how does it relate to likely economic outcomes from the proposed Biden green jobs program? Keep in mind that the most important contributor to long-run economic growth comes from productivity improvement. This is chiefly due to the diminishing returns from labor over the long run. For instance, a skilled bricklayer today can build a brick walkway of a given length and width in about the same time as it took his grandfather. Due to the nature of their work, most labor-intensive service economy occupations can achieve little improvement in the way of marginal return from the effects of productivity-enhancing innovation. This is in stark contrast to a goods-producing industry like automobile assembly which has seen significant and continuous labor productivity gains from the employment of capital goods like robotic assembly tools, material substitutes and other automation features. Indeed, the gradual shift of the U.S. from a goods-producing to a services-based economy, where a large portion of economic output is now derived from slow productivity-growing personal service labor, is the primary reason why U.S. economic growth rates today are substantially lower than decades earlier.

When U.S. non-farm labor productivity over the past 17 years is examined, one notices a pronounced secular downtrend beginning in 2004. But suddenly in 2010, a sudden increase in measured productivity occurred in the quarters immediately after ARRA spending began flowing through the economy. A large stimulative fiscal impact (numerator) unleashed on an economy where labor hours were rapidly contracting (denominator) sent “measured“ labor productivity soaring, albeit momentarily. Clearly it was only a relatively short-duration artifact of measurement dynamics showing a large productivity burst within a longer-term secular downtrend as the chart below clearly depicts.

SOURCE: BLS Non-Farm Real Output per Person

Once the economic stupor of massive deficit spending had subsided, the low rate of Obama economic growth and low productivity began to assert itself. Real GDP and real output per hour worked (with the exception of the Carter runaway inflation era) posted the lowest sustained levels ever recorded in the U.S. post-war period as the nearby chart shows. The low productivity engineered by Obama policies was clearly aided and abetted by increasing deployment of productivity-destroying green energy investments like solar, wind, biofuels and electrified transport. During the Obama years, these green energy pursuits were carried out at a relatively small scale compared to Biden’s announced ambitions. For instance, even after all of Obama’s Herculean exertions, wind and solar output accounted for just 10.4% of U.S. electricity generation in 2020 and 4.6% of U.S. primary energy. Biden seeks to convert this wind and solar penetration in electricity generation to 100% by 2035, a nearly 10-fold increase.

SOURCE: BLS Non-Farm Real Output per Hour

SOURCE: Bureau of Economic Analysis Real GDP Annual Data 1947-to-2016; Quarterly Annualized Data 2017-to-2019

Electric Vehicles and Economic Growth

While much of the attention thus far has been focused on solar and wind power deployment, there is another critical productivity-degrading feature to the Obama-Biden green energy program. Obama campaigned on a promise to put 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. At least, in February 2007 when Obama threw his hat into the ring, the U.S. only derived about 62.5% of its primary energy and a paltry 49.2% of its petroleum consumption requirements from domestic supply sources. So there was a putative import-displacing rationale to his proposal. Nevertheless, the plan was a ridiculously delusional overreach. Thankfully for the sake of job-seekers and the economy, it didn’t come close to fruition. Needless to say, Biden plans to triple-down on Obama’s program by using government resources to promote, or likely emulate California governor Newsom’s plan to force, electric vehicle (EV) adoption.

The first widespread fallacy that green energy boosters make is their contention that EV adoption will result in a major economic boom because new cars will be needed. That fallacy is easily debunked. Sure, auto assembly plants will be humming with activity churning out the cars of the future. Look at all the jobs and income that will create. Assembly and sub-assembly parts suppliers will be kept busy manufacturing components that are used in EVs. Truckers will receive a steady flow of orders to haul parts in and finished vehicles out of vehicle assembly plants, or raw materials in and finished assembly parts out of parts suppliers’ plants. And so on.

But that same activity is already happening today. Is there any reason to believe that a switchover to EV adoption will suddenly translate into far larger unit sales of finished autos and trucks? If so, it is a well-kept secret as the chart of unit sales of autos and light trucks over the last 3 decades demonstrates.

SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis; Light Weight Vehicle Sales: Autos and Light Trucks (ALTSALES)

In addition, there is the critical aspect of domestic content of existing conventional vs. EV cars of the future. Unless major EV components like batteries and electric motors are fabricated and assembled in the U.S. ― and there is little evidence suggesting EV domestic content percentages will materially improve ― there is no net benefit compared with conventional automobiles and trucks. Indeed, China controls 70% of global EV battery production. The U.S. controls less than 10%. All of the nickel, cobalt and lithium used to produce EV batteries is sourced from outside the U.S. While the net foreign vs. domestic content calculations are complex, the prospect for vast net economic benefit from domestic EV production is not looking too rosy at first glance.

So how could EV adoption lead to substantial economic degradation through productivity erosion? What is the basis for economic pessimism over the Biden EV plan, especially after its boosters claim it will be so economically beneficial? The primary reasons for relatively slow EV adoption are higher EV prices relative to comparable conventional models, consumer hesitancy over EV range anxiety, and the sparse availability of EV charging infrastructure.

Price issues are being addressed through massive federal and state incentives along with continuous reduction in lithium-ion battery cost. Range anxiety is being addressed through improvements in battery technology, larger capacities and range-extending devices. That leaves charging infrastructure as the last consumer hurdle to overcome. And therein lies the rub, economically speaking.

The Broken Windows of Electric Vehicles

French economist Frédéric Bastiat published a pamphlet in 1850 whose title is translated “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” Many people, even including Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, seem to accept on faith the delusion that “war is good for the economy.” Bastiat showed through his “parable of the broken window” ― more commonly referred to as “the broken window fallacy” ― that such is not the case. Simply stated, as a way to boost economic activity, one might go around the neighborhood breaking windows. Doing so would necessitate copious economic activity among glaziers who perform window repair. They, in turn, would keep foundries busy making replacement windows. Those foundries would place orders with raw material suppliers and pay wages to workers to produce new windows. Hauliers would be kept busy delivering raw materials and finished goods.

And so on goes the myth. Yet, in the end, once all the windows were fixed, we would have seen a massive quantity of scarce economic resources expended just to return us to our original state of social welfare, resources that could have been used to create incremental welfare improvements that must now be foregone. Like war, broken windows are merely an opportunity cost, and thinking otherwise is charlatanism. Prestigious publications like The Economist and presidential economic advisors like Larry Summers or Nobel laureates like Paul Krugman regularly demonstrate they are by no means immune to the fallacy.

To overcome the last EV consumer adoption hurdle (i.e. range anxiety), federal and state governments will likely need to both mandate and incentivize a massive and breathtakingly expensive charging network. In many states, buildings, work places, roadways, and retail centers over a certain size will likely be required to install an ever-increasing number of charge points throughout their parking lots and garages. Public streets and roadways will also be torn up to install charging stations and load-carrying infrastructure needed to handle higher loads. The political effect will be to help overcome consumer anxiety about availability of vehicle charging. But the economic effect will be to degrade GDP growth as massive expenditures that could otherwise be used to finance improvements in societal well-being will be siphoned off to create a vehicle refueling infrastructure that is less efficient, more resource-intensive, and more time-consuming than the one that already exists. The massive flood of expenditure will merely be used to create a network that adds nothing to net societal welfare, and will likely subtract from it. The charging network is an example of the broken windows fallacy played out on a massive, nationwide scale.

Furthermore, each charge point is likely to suffer significantly lower utilization than existing fuel pumps. This author’s nearby suburban fueling station is a good example of that shift. Throughout daylight hours, each fuel pump is occupied on average about half of the time with motorists refueling vehicles. The average dwell time per refueling event is 6 to 7 minutes, but assume it’s 10 minutes to illustrate the point. During that time, the average fuel expenditure at today’s prices is between $30 and $45 which supplies enough stored chemical energy to provide a motorist with 275-to-350 miles before refueling. Thus, each fueling pump delivers an average of 7-to-10 days of motoring (based upon average annual vehicle distance of 13,476 miles) within 10 minutes before it is made free to accept another customer. Each pump can accommodate perhaps 30 refueling events in a typical 10-hour day (although the station is open 24 hours and many motorists refuel during nighttime hours, improving utilization and equipment productivity).

With an EV charge point, a motorist will pull into a charge point-equipped parking spot and occupy it for a very long duration, maybe even all day. There are two reasons for that. It takes significantly longer to recharge an EV and because the primary purpose of that parking spot is vehicle parking. During that dwell time, the vehicle might accept an average of 30-to-45 kilowatt-hours of electrical energy that cost U.S. residential consumers an average of $0.1323 per kWh in 2020. But commercial charging prices are 3-to-4 times that amount. That will provide about 90-to-135 miles of driving distance at 3 miles per kWh, although lithium-ion batteries can really only be charged to 80% of their capacity since charging above this amount will result in battery damage.

The cost of each charge point installation may be $50,000 or even more given that nearly all will require retrofitting existing streets, lots, and garages. New buildings may entail a lower cost than this on average. But it will probably take a century to completely replace the existing stock of buildings. Each charge point will likely be occupied only once during an entire calendar day ― or each of 5 days per week for workplace infrastructure ― delivering about $4-to-$6 of revenue potential per day. The daily profit potential will be far less since charging resellers will need to pay a bulk commercial rate, which was $0.1066 per kWh in 2020, to acquire the electricity from utility generators.

Commercial charge distributor Electrify America has a solution to this economic productivity degradation problem. A pricing structure has been established that essentially necessitates EV motorists become captive during charging. Electrify America allows a “10-minute grace period” after charging is complete. Dwell times exceeding that are charged an occupancy penalty of $0.40 per minute. If a motorist is delayed by an hour, the penalty would amount to $20.00. The electricity tariff price for Washington, DC motorists is $0.43 per kWh, which is 3.4 times the electricity price in 2020 for residents. If you live in a dwelling without home charging (a row home, an apartment complex, etc.) or simply don’t want to bear the expense of rewiring your home to accept 240-volt charging, expect to waste 500-to-700 hours of time each year in EV recharging. Your car has become your new office or home.

Indeed, recognizing the entire economic case resides solely in asset utilization rather than in reselling electricity, commercial charge distributor EVgo doesn’t even care how much electricity flow occurs. Motorists pay strictly according to occupancy time. In Washington, DC, the current tariff structure costs non-members $0.30 per minute on the fast Direct Current charger. The firm advises that a typical EV can achieve 90-to-120 miles on a 45-minute session, which would cost $13.50. If your vehicle has a 30 kW charge rate, the effective price is $0.60 per kilowatt-hour. Compare that to the average nationwide residential rate of $0.1323 per kWh. That’s 4.5 times the nationwide rate. It amounts to between 11.25 and 15 cents per mile. An internal combustion vehicle that gets 25 miles per gallon refilling today at my nearby station would pay $2.39 per gallon for regular unleaded 87 octane gasoline, which costs 9.56¢ per mile.

On top of all that, most homeowners will likely choose to equip themselves with home charge systems to provide overnight charging. That may require a homeowner to replace the service entry cable to the home with expanded wattage capacity to accept a larger current load required for efficient recharging. That would entail thousands of dollars for equipment and retrofitting. The amount of poorly utilized, low productivity infrastructure investment required on average to support a single EV is simply staggering ― and thus economically degrading. EV motorists will also find themselves charging every day of their lives compared to the conventional vehicle motorist visiting a refueling station once every 7-to-10 days. Thus, to avoid economic degradation, consumers will sacrifice loads of leisure time and surrender loads of cash. None of this damage will show up in National Income and Product Accounts maintained by GDP scorekeeper U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis during the Biden term. But it will represent a significant decline in our standard of living.

To sum it up, EV purchases are unlikely to generate any net economic growth because they will merely be substitutes for conventional models. And anecdotal evidence thus far suggests these EV purchases may actually degrade economic performance with their higher price tags, which will reduce disposable income, and higher percentage of foreign content, which will worsen GDP growth as well as the balance of trade and current account deficits. Meanwhile, nationwide installation of an economically-destabilizing charge point network, with its “broken windows” efficiency degradation, will entail ruinous and expensive tearing up of streets, buildings, parking lots, homes and other places to install very low-productivity charging systems that are far less beneficial than existing refueling systems. The value of charging infrastructure investment required to support EVs will be many times the embedded investment required to support conventional vehicle refueling. None of these realities provides any reassurance that optimistic claims by Green New Deal proponents are well grounded.

PHOTO CREDIT: Mike Travers, “The Hidden Cost of Net-Zero: Rewiring the UK”, GWPF

The real “net-zero” the U.S. is likely to achieve is net-zero economic growth as labor and capital productivity is deeply degraded, net-zero carbon dioxide reduction as production is merely shifted to other countries, and net-zero reduction in pollution as production and emissions are shifted to foreign countries with far less stringent environmental abatement restrictions.

The Green Jobs Promise

Biden’s inauguration address included a strong admonition against dishonesty, particularly as it relates to public policy. “We must reject a culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured,” he claimed. Clearly that doesn’t apply to claims about the danger posed by human-caused climate change, the true cost green energy, the net job-creating potential of his grandiose proposals, the compensation levels of the green jobs he wants to create or those he intends to destroy, the prospects for green job unionization, the number of green jobs already in the economy, and the economic impact his green jobs program is likely to have in the long run.

Barack Obama campaigned on a promise that if the U.S. “invested” $150 billion in green energy technology, it would “create 5 million jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced.” Needless to say, Obama didn’t come close to fulfilling his jobs promise. Rather than a flood of high-paying green jobs that couldn’t be outsourced, taxpayers received a flood of red ink pouring out of an endless succession of crony-connected green energy megaflops.

Obama’s excursion into green energy venture capital entrepreneurship resulted in a mountain of embarrassing collapses. Taxpayers had been forced to fund a lengthy string of humiliating failures like Solyndra ($535 million lost), Abound Solar ($400 Million squandered), Range Fuels ($156 million), Evergreen Solar ($25 million), A123 Systems ($279 million), SpectraWatt ($0.5 million), Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million), Raser Technologies ($33 million), Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million), Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million), Thompson River Power LLC ($6.5 million), Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million), Azure Dynamics ($5.4 million), Nordic Windpower ($16 million), Satcon Technology Corp. ($3 million), Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20 million), Sun Edison ($846 million), Abengoa ($2.9 billion), Beacon Power ($43 million), Ener1 ($118.5 million), Amonix Solar ($5.9 million), Fisker Automotive ($529 million), Crescent Dunes ($737 million), Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($0.7 million), etc.

And these are just the taxpayer loan recipients that went bankrupt. A lengthier list of government-backed loan and guarantee recipients either failed to produce any tangible value before abandoning their efforts or severely underperformed on their contractual promises.

Green Job Counting

Shortly after the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) was signed into law, the U.S. Department of Labor was directed to initiate a survey of Green Goods and Services (GGS) in an effort to demonstrate that the promised bounty of green jobs was being harvested. The heavily left-leaning Brookings Institution initiated a parallel effort, compiling a lengthy report in 2011 entitled Sizing the Green Economy, an effort designed to count the number of green jobs in the economy. It’s abundantly clear that the vast majority of green jobs identified by the Brookings authors were ones that had long-predated the ARRA “stimulus” plan, Obama’s election, or even Obama’s birth. Those jobs involved mass transit workers (350,547 jobs), agriculture conservation (314,983 jobs), waste management and treatment (386,116 jobs), etc., But there was a comparatively small number that involved green energy generation, electric vehicles, or energy efficiency improvement. As Brookings Institute analysts Mark Muro, Jonathan Rothwell and Devashree Saha observed in their 2011 report, “the vast majority of clean economy jobs produce goods or services that protect the environment or reduce pollution in ways that have little to do with energy or energy efficiency.”

The first GGS report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) established a 2010 baseline of 3,129,112 green jobs in all occupational classifications. During 2011, BLS published three quarterly GGS employment reports (Q1 2011, Q2 2011, Q3 2011). Despite more than $90 billion in government grants and loan guarantees having been disbursed, the third GGS report showed there had been only 9,245 green jobs created up to that point. That finding led to a firestorm of criticism in a GOP-controlled Congress. Even lapdog media outlet accounts had trouble disguising the epic failure.

The hilarious aspect of the GGS kabuki theater was the rules BLS employed to boost the count of green jobs. While the green job definition rules are expansive, they can be summarized under two categories:

1. Jobs in businesses that produce goods or provide services that benefit the environment or conserve natural resources.

2. Jobs in which workers' duties involve making their establishment's production processes more environmentally friendly or use fewer natural resources.

Despite these fairly straightforward definitions, BLS managed to locate 860,289 government workers in its 2010 baseline count of green jobs even though those workers produce nothing but red tape. BLS published a list of more than 1,200 occupational classifications that were adjudged to be included or excluded in their green jobs classifications. Consider some of the Byzantine nuance involved in delineating green jobs as opposed to jobs that don’t qualify under this critically important workforce accounting agenda:

* A farmer who grows squash using organic farming that contaminates groundwater is a green job worker but not a farmer who uses inorganic fertilizer even though the yield generated by an inorganic farmer may be 50% higher than his organic farming counterpart, who thus requires far less cultivable, deforested land area for the same quantity of produce, and whose output is 6 times less likely to contain deadly e coli contamination.

* “Food producers who distribute locally and businesses that purchase locally produced food” according to BLS definitions are classified as green jobs despite the fact that locally-grown food is often far more resource-intensive than alternatives produced in more distant locations that benefit from the economies of specialization, scale, scope, and trade.

* A farmer who grows corn for human or animal consumption is not a green job holder but one who sells his output to an ethanol refinery to be incinerated to produce an energy inefficient, low power-density fuel is a green job worker.

* A logger who clear-cuts an old-growth forest for timber intended for CO2-emitting biomass electricity generation is a green job worker but not a logger in a fast-growing, non-emitting, carbon-sequestering, high carbon-stock conifer farm whose output is used to build a house.

* Workers at fabric coating mills are not green job holders but their colleagues at carpet, rug, and household textile mills may be.

* A technician who repairs a 1968 model refrigerator is classified as a green job worker while a person who installs a new model might not qualify even though the new model might consume 70% less energy.

* Jobs in coal generation obviously are not green jobs, but neither are those in natural gas generation including workers involved in retrofitting coal generation stations with natural gas turbines that emit half as much CO2 as coal per unit of energy produced.

* A worker performing automotive repair holds a green job, but not if he repairs the body, glass or interior.

* A contractor who repairs your stereo has a green job but not one who repairs your lawn mower.

* Workers at secular grant-making foundations that fund environmental research and education have green jobs but religious organizations that do exactly the same thing do not.

* Business associations and professional organizations qualify as green jobs but labor unions do not.

* A docent in an environmental or science museum has a green job but not one in a history or art museum.

* An antique furniture dealer has a green job but a conventional furniture dealer does not.

* Transportation program administrators who plan mass transit occupy green jobs but their colleagues in adjacent cubicles planning roads and bridges do not.

* A K Street lawyer who lobbies for taxpayer-funded, crony-connected green energy megaflops like Solyndra is a green job worker while a soup-kitchen worker who helps feed the destitute or a nurse who comforts cancer-stricken patients is not.

* A building inspector who audits for environmental compliance holds a green job but one who performs fire safety certification does not.

. . . and so on.

Don’t try to make any sense of this. It is what it is. If you conclude from the foregoing that anyone who degrades economic performance is a green job worker, you’re not terribly mistaken. As Diana Furchtgott-Roth of Manhattan Institute notes, “The entire exercise is an attempt to justify government initiatives, while in practice doing nothing to make America more efficient.” It was merely an effort to show that in spite of all the colossal failures, it was still a great idea to spend $150 billion of borrowed money to achieve the lowest sustained rate of economic growth since the Great Depression. And now the Biden administration is proposing to spend $2 trillion of borrowed money to perform exactly the identical illogical exercise, promising to obtain the opposite result.

After several quarters of GGS reporting by BLS that had produced nothing but humiliating results, Obama laughingly ordered a total abandonment of the green jobs counting exercise. He preposterously cited budget sequestration constraints imposed by the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act as his reason.

Nevertheless, the Ahab-like quest goes on elsewhere. Brookings updated its 2011 green jobs sizing exercise in April 2019 because, as they claim, “These counts are vital, confirming the extent of the country’s energy evolution.” You can’t just examine energy output statistics. You need to examine how many antique dealers, organic squash farmers, automotive transmission repair mechanics, window installers, local food growers, K Street green megaflop lobbyists and other vital occupational classification job holders we have. Don’t try to make any sense of that either.

Brookings helpfully tells us “The transition to the clean energy economy will primarily involve 320 unique occupations spread across three major industrial sectors: clean energy production, energy efficiency, and environmental management.” So we have a definite number of places to look for green jobs, a much smaller count that the BLS list of more than 1,200 occupational classifications. That’s a relief.

Brookings goes on to tell us triumphantly that:

“Workers in clean energy earn higher and more equitable wages when compared to all workers nationally. Mean hourly wages exceed national averages by 8 to 19 percent. Clean energy economy wages are also more equitable; workers at lower ends of the income spectrum can earn $5 to $10 more per hour than other jobs.”

Needless to say, that’s also good news. What they neglected to mention was how those wages compare against wages in the industrial jobs they’re busy destroying. Let’s take a look.

BLS reports that a solar photovoltaic panel installer (Occupational Code 47-2231) can earn a median annual wage of $44,890 in 2019, or $21.58 per hour. That’s a little bit lower than the median wages reported in the same year from the Clean Jobs, Better Jobs report table shown in Part 2 of this report. A wind turbine service technician (Occupational Code 49-9081) earns a median annual wage of $52,910, or $25.44 per hour, which is exactly in agreement with the number reported in the same table.

In contrast, construction and extraction workers in coal mining (Occupational Code 47-0000) can expect to earn a median annual wage of $59,380, or $28.55 per hour. Installation, maintenance, and repair occupations (Occupational Code 49-0000) in the oil and natural gas pipeline industry can expect median annual wages of $64,220, or $30.88 per hour. Wages in oil and gas extraction average $101,925 per year or $47.46 per hour.

Recall when Brookings assured us that “Workers in clean energy earn higher and more equitable wages when compared to all workers nationally.” We know that green energy wages don’t compare well to wages in conventional energy industries. But is their statement even true in respect to “all workers nationally”? Solar photovoltaic installers earn $21.58 per hour and wind turbine technicians earn $25.44 per hour. Meanwhile, “all workers nationally” averaged $28.36 per hour in December 2019 according to the BLS Payroll Survey (or Current Employment Statistics wage data), far higher than green energy workers. Thus, nothing Biden or his media sycophants say about good-paying green energy jobs is accurate.

[End of Part 1]

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Joseph Toomey is a career management consultant with undergraduate and MBA degrees in finance. He is the author of AN UNWORTHY FUTURE, an economic appraisal of Obama’s 'green energy' economy.