by Michael Peck

Deliberate misinformation on how green jobs are created in Spain creates strange bedfellows, in this case conservative columnist George Will and progressive Joel Kotkin.

On Thursday, June 25th, Will published an op-ed, “Tilting at Green Windmills,” in The Washington Post quoting as fact a fatally flawed and fully discredited study by a Spanish professor, Gabriel Calzada, who gets his funding from Exxon Mobil. Mr. Will echoed, almost verbatim, the salivating possibility (ricocheting on right wing blogs and parroted by Fox’s “drama-as-news-queen”, Glenn Beck) that Spain, contrary to President Obama’s assertions, is not a credible green economy model the U.S. should follow and that public spending on renewable energy destroys jobs. Mr. Will opined that when President Obama “speaks of ‘new green energy economies’ creating ‘countless well-paying jobs,’ perhaps they really are countless, meaning incapable of being counted.”

More alarming, Joel Kotkin’s more recent article, “Green Jobs Can’t Save The Economy,” published in Forbes, also blindly quotes the “Spanish Study” as proof that the green economy eats its young. But contrary to Mr. Kotkin’s opening assertion, there’s nothing “pathetic” about America’s green jobs movement. In less than two years, the Blue Green Alliance has over seven million members, and groups like the Apollo Alliance, replete with validated green manufacturing studies and outreach networks, are buttressed by Senator Sherrod Brown’s (D-OH) recently introduced “Investments for Manufacturing Progress and Clean Technology” (IMPACT) Act, a bill to boost domestic clean energy manufacturing and ensure that new clean energy jobs stay in America. What WOULD be pathetic, however, is watching the manufacturing of green energy components being outsourced to China, India, and elsewhere and doing nothing about it.

Here at home, Professor Calzada’s study has been supported ferociously by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Heritage Foundation and the Institute for Energy Research, who argue that climate change can’t be proved and even if it does exist then humanity’s contributions to it can’t be verified, that below ground fuels are the way to go, and that above ground renewable fuels such as wind and solar can’t be trusted. It’s not surprising that Mr. Will has benefitted from paid speeches to the same crowd, as he admits in his op-ed.

The Calzada study was immediately dismissed in Spain with scant coverage, even by local right of center publications, due to its misuse of facts and manipulated conclusions. In the U.S., however, thanks to promoters such as Mr. Will, Mr. Beck, and Mr. Kotkin, we are witnessing a different media phenomenon, one based on diffusion without verification, making sure we hum their hit song before we know what the lyrics actually mean.

In a May 20th letter to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman Teresa Ribera Rodriguez, Spain’s Secretary of State for Climate and Minister of the Environment for Rural and Marine Affairs, states that “data used in [the Calzada] analysis are totally out of keeping with the current reality of the sector,” and that the analysis is “simplistic” and uses a “non-rigorous methodology.”

In fact, Spain gets 11 percent of its power from wind on average. Thanks to gale forces, Spain actually set a record for wind power generation when more than 40 percent of the country’s energy needs were covered by wind turbines for a period on March 5th of this year. The Spanish region of Navarra already is at 65 percent renewable energy and is aiming for 100 percent in the near future. The Spanish region of Aragon has more revenue from a new source such as wind power than from a traditional source such as agriculture (products derived from agriculture account for 10 percent of Spain’s GNP).

On April 28th, Spain’s Industry Ministry announced the country’s 2008 energy sector results and mentioned that about 73,000 jobs were created locally just by the country’s wind industry. Mr. Will’s Calzada study comes up with 50,000 jobs for Spain’s entire renewable sector. Spain’s trade unions, no strangers to job counting, have published a significant rebuttal to the Calzada study which states that circa 89,000 direct jobs in addition to 99,600 indirect jobs have been created in Spain’s renewable energy sector due entirely to Spain’s enlightened energy-self-sufficiency policies.

The Wall Street Journal’s energy blog concluded several weeks ago that the Calzada study “doesn’t actually identify those jobs allegedly destroyed by renewable-energy spending.” The Spanish Ministry of Labor has found that, contrary to the Calzada report, renewable energy industries have created 175,000 jobs and the European Commission found that an aggressive renewable policy would create a net increase of over 400,000 jobs in the European Union by 2020 giving “a significant boost to the economy and the number of jobs in the EU”. So much for facts made in Spain over fiction made in America.

For the United States, the pocketbook issue is whether increased emphasis on renewable energy will create jobs here at home. Based on verifiable data collected, the wind energy industry now employs 85,000 Americans and created 35,000 new jobs in 2008 alone, making it clear that wind power means jobs. The U.S. wind industry believes it can prove this number will climb once and if Congress passes and the Administration signs on to a strong and credible national renewable electricity standard (at least 12% by 2012) to ensure that President Obama’s green job campaign predictions become working class reality. In a local Pennsylvania context, the presence of the Spanish wind turbine manufacturer, Gamesa, with more than 850 green and good jobs, over $200 million invested, and two wind factories in the Commonwealth de-rusting the rust belt and hiring former steelworkers since 2005 – represents both the promise and the reality of the emerging Green Economy.

In every market, green job creation is a direct outgrowth of progressive and forward-looking policies and regulation. Right now, the global green economy offers three large markets competing for manufacturing investments: China, Europe, and the U.S. Joel Kotkin does get it right when he writes that, “The U.S.’ overall “green” trade balance has moved from a $14.4 billion surplus in 1997 to a nearly $9 billion deficit last year. As the country has pushed green energy, ostensibly to free itself from foreign energy, it has become ever more dependent on countries such as China, Japan and Germany for critical technology. Some of this is directly attributable to the often massive subsidies these countries offer to green-tech companies.”

The effects of what is really happening often escape our pundits. The American steel industry produces one ton of steel using 15 man-hours. A comparable ton of steel in China is produced with 110 man-hours. Chinese steel plants produce three times the amount of carbon emissions per ton of steel. Any wind turbine manufacturer or wind farm developer that installs wind turbine components made with Chinese steel is putting more carbon in the global system per unit than wind energy can take out. In the end, what the outsourcer gains in temporary price advantages, the hosting market loses to higher social costs resulting from damage control healthcare, environmental degradation, and worker exploitation. Maybe this is what Mr. Kotkin really means by “pathetic” outcomes.

Mr. Kotkin’s final thought, that “After all, the economy needs green jobs less than green jobs need a thriving economy” sounds catchy but fully misses the interrelationships between green job creation and energy markets in the real world. We’ve experienced a thriving economy in this country without green jobs but through a complete dependence on petrochemical geopolitics and it didn’t work. The U.S. is learning the hard way via Iraq and Venezuela what it means to be energy dependent on hostile overseas regimes.

In the real infrastructure world, U.S. utilities who wish to upgrade local transmission lines to accommodate more renewable energy sources know there is not one single U.S.-based electrical transformer manufacturer still operating, and this means a long queue of supplicants to the benefit of overseas providers. When we don’t control our own manufacturing destiny and we no longer make the products our nation’s infrastructure self-sufficiency needs to fulfill local commitments to produce growth and energy independence, then we’re seriously hobbled.

The green economy is meeting the enemy and it is us. It’s clear that Mr. Will and Mr. Beck would rather grasp at thoroughly discredited ideological straws than tilt at climate change using green windmills but then that’s how they earn their multimillion dollar salaries. It’s clear that in Mr. Kotkin’s world, we can build it and they will come. The problem is that we’re already here and it’s not yet built. Leo Gerard, President of the United Steelworkers Union, likes to point out that the false choice between good jobs and a healthy environment is no longer sustainable. It’s not either-or, it’s all or nothing.

-MICHAEL A. PECK-

The writer serves on the board of the Apollo Alliance, is a member of the advisory board to the Blue Green Alliance, and works with several of Spain’s leading green energy multinationals in the U.S. including Gamesa in Pennsylvania.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Green-Collar Jobs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.