by Jill Fitzsimmons, in a Media Matters repost
In an editorial blasting President Obama’s green jobs initiatives, the New York Post falsely claimed that despite significant investments in clean energy, California’s “environmental sector has actually lost jobs, not gained them”:
[T]he Obama administration’s entire green-jobs initiative has been a massive boondoggle.
As The New York Times reported last month, Obama’s grand plan to create 5 million green jobs over 10 years has turned into an enormous “pipe dream.”
In California, for example, the environmental sector has actually lost jobs, not gained them.
Which raises serious questions about this administration’s ability to come up with any kind of plan that will productively address America’s unemployment crisis.
In fact, those job losses refer only to the San Jose metro area, not to the state of California as a whole, which has gained almost 80,000 green jobs since 2003 — a 4.2% annual increase – and leads the nation in the number of clean energy jobs.
Those numbers come from a recent Brookings Institution report assessing green jobs nationally and regionally, which was the subject of the New York Times/Bay Citizen article cited by the New York Post editorial. The Times article has been criticized for cherry-picking information from the Brookings report to paint a misleadingly negative picture of green job growth.
Contrary to the New York Post‘s dismissal of green jobs programs, Brookings found that Recovery Act investments contributed to a surge of growth in the clean economy, despite the recession:
[D]uring the middle of the recession–from 2008 to 2009–the clean economy grew faster than the rest of the economy, expanding at a rate of 8.3 percent. This is likely due, in part, to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which channeled large sums of public spending towards clean energy projects through much of 2009.
The report further concluded that its analysis “warrants excitement,” adding that “smart policy support,” rather than policy “uncertainties,” will be required in order to make the most of promising clean economy segments:
The measurements, trends, and discussions offered here provide an encouraging but also challenging assessment of the ongoing development of the clean economy in the United States and its regions. In many respects, the analysis warrants excitement. As the nation continues to search for new sources of high-quality growth, the present findings depict a sizable and diverse array of industry segments that is – in key private-sector areas – expanding rapidly at a time of sluggish national growth. With smart policy support, broader, more rapid growth seems possible. At the same time, however, the information presented here is challenging, most notably because the growth of the clean economy has almost certainly been depressed by significant policy problems and uncertainties.
In that sense, what is most challenging here is the fundamental question raised by the dynamic growth but modest size of the most vibrant and promising segments of the clean economy.
That question is: Will the nation marshal the will to make the most of those industries?
The New York Post is not the first conservative media outlet to twist the facts to support its bizarre opposition to American clean energy.
Gateway Pundit, Hot Air and Town Hall gleefully trumpeted the New York Times‘ article as the final nail in the coffin for President Obama’s green jobs efforts. Investor’s Business Daily wrote that “the fact that President Obama’s ‘green jobs’ campaign has been an enormously expensive failure is now so glaringly obvious even the New York Times can’t ignore it any longer.”
And Fox News has repeatedly cited a discredited Spanish study to claim that clean energy investments destroy more jobs than they create.
But whether they like it or not, the Brookings data is further evidence that a robust clean economy is ours for the taking.
– Jill Fitzsimmons, in a Media Matters repost
Related Posts:
- How Murdoch’s Times of London and Fox News Coordinate Their Deceitful Reporting on Climate Change
- Connecting the Dots from News Corp Scandal to the Dangerous Lies of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal
- Absurd NY Times Story on Green Jobs Ignores “Explosive Growth” Documented in the Sector
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Colour me unsurprised.
It seems to me that the worst possible argument for green energy is job creation. Jobs can be created by digging holes and filling them again, but the waste is more obvious and so we don’t do that. As a certified lazy person, I contend that working less is better. I would like to create renewable energy using as little labor as possible. The best way to provide jobs to those who need them is through job sharing and reduction of standard work hours, not by favoring less labor-efficient energy production methods.
With many people seeing stagnant or worse compensation and higher costs of living over the past several years, I’m not sure job sharing and fewer hours would go over well at this point. And at least in the initial installation phases, green energy and efficiency improvement are fairly labor intensive, so to many that’s just icing on the cake in today’s economy.
THeodore’s point is interesting: Jobs is not the best metric for green energy. However, we have to counter the anti-green, pro-pollution propaganda wherever it is.
We want to convert all dirty energy jobs — mining and drilling — to clean energy jobs, like efficiency and renewables. The jobs will be better for the workers themselves and for all their fellow citizens and fellow humans.
Why would Rupert Murdoch be displeased by these improvements for his readers?
Murdoch’s empire is based upon lies and disinformation. They are experts in the field and their message of nonsense is pabulum to the uneducated masses, at least to those who read his rags or watch his visual media.
It is the responsibility of those who know better to speak out against this kind of nonsense at every opportunity. My compliments to Joe for providing this forum to use as a counter-weight to the Murdoch empire. We need more of these and if the mainstream media could find the cojones to speak out that would be wonderful as well. I won’t be holding my breath.
The continuing drumbeat here from the right isn’t surprising, but they already have climate change action off the table – IMHO, they are going for the extermination of these industries in the US before they become too big to stop – with the bought off GOP and the dumping Chinese it would appear they have a good chance of succeeding.
In the UK some very sensible people are beginning to marry up the need to progress the green agenda with the urgent need to create new jobs
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2011/09/09/obama-can-do-it-and-so-can-we-nows-the-time-for-a-stimulus/