Marathon Pundit: NYT: Obama's Green Dream of jobs a big nightmare

Friday, August 19, 2011

NYT: Obama's Green Dream of jobs a big nightmare

Looking for green jobs

President Obama's "Green Dream" just isn't working. It's so obvious that even New York Times is taking notice.

And Van Jones is frustrated.

In the Bay Area as in much of the country, the green economy is not proving to be the job-creation engine that many politicians envisioned. President Obama once pledged to create five million green jobs over 10 years. Gov. Jerry Brown promised 500,000 clean-technology jobs statewide by the end of the decade. But the results so far suggest such numbers are a pipe dream.

"I won't say I'm not frustrated," said Van Jones, an Oakland activist who served briefly as Mr. Obama's green-jobs czar before resigning under fire after conservative critics said he had signed a petition accusing the Bush administration of deliberately allowing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a claim Mr. Jones denies.

A study released in July by the non-partisan Brookings Institution found clean-technology jobs accounted for just 2 percent of employment nationwide and only slightly more — 2.2 percent — in Silicon Valley. Rather than adding jobs, the study found, the sector actually lost 492 positions from 2003 to 2010 in the South Bay, where the unemployment rate in June was 10.5 percent.

Federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show. Two years after it was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize drafty homes, California has spent only a little over half that sum and has so far created the equivalent of just 538 full-time jobs in the last quarter, according to the State Department of Community Services and Development.

Pajamas Media's Tatler blog supplies the first exclamation point:

The "green jobs" drive was never really about jobs, it was about "fundamental transformation" and putting Washington more in command of the economy. That has failed, in no small part because Obama's own regulatory state keeps driving jobs out of the country. There's a reason manufacturers keep moving to China, and it's not the reason Tom Friedman thinks it is. China hasn't become more efficient than the US, but it has become less hostile to business than the US is under Obama.

Yeah, a Communist dictatorship less hostile to business than the nation that all but globalized free trade and enterprise. That's what we've come to.

As for the second exclamation point, Byron York just appeared on Fox News' Happening Now where he discussed his latest Washington Examiner column and the bailing of a liberal Democrat from the Green Dream:

"Of course, we want to be a part of the new innovation and the green jobs," Rep. Maxine Waters said on MSNBC Thursday. "But you know, the green jobs have been about a lot of talk and not a lot has been happening on that." A few hours later, also on MSNBC, Waters said flatly: "All of this talk about the green jobs never materialized."