OPINION:
Harkening back to the Green Jobs programs of his vice-presidential tenure, presidential candidate Joe Biden again commandeers the plight of the disadvantaged to funnel big bucks to the undeserving in his new climate plan. The Biden plan is chock full of “climate justice” and is denominated in trillions of dollars, but the truly needy are just as likely to be pawns again, left behind by his new plan as they were by his old one.
Eleven years ago, Mr. Biden was vice president and the Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress as well as the White House. Just as today, they dressed up a trillion-dollar power grab as a plan to help the down-and-out. Today it is climate justice, then it was green jobs.
And that sure worked out nicely for the Wall Street financiers that backed the Obama-Biden ticket, but not so well for green-job seekers.
Of course, there were green-jobs programs, but they were based on the notion that markets do not work. That is, they assumed that D.C. bureaucrats had better information and incentives to match job skills with employer needs. It was typical Washington hubris with the typical Washington failure.
The federal Department of Labor issued four reports on the Green Jobs Program. The findings exposed pathetic standards and targets, and even those were not met. For instance, half of the training programs provided five or fewer days of training. Over 20% of the “degrees” and certificates went to people with only one day of training. Job placement met only 10% of the targeted level and a much smaller fraction remained employed for at least six months.
In an attempt to juice up the number of green jobs created, the definitions became comical. The single largest “green” jobs category was “janitors and cleaners, except maids and housekeeping cleaners.” This is not a knock on the residential and commercial cleaning industry, but the reports concluded there were 33 times more “green” jobs in the septic tank and portable toilet servicing industry than in solar electric utilities.
So much for the promised new, “clean energy-economy.”
It was all so embarrassing, that the future reports were defunded under the guise of balancing the federal budget, “… in order to achieve some of the savings required by the order, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) eliminated all ‘measuring green jobs’ products.” It is as if erasing the data would erase the historic blunder all together.
So, if the low-wage workers did not get much of the trillion-dollar stimulus plan, who did?
As The Washington Post noted, “The administration … gave easy access to venture capitalists with stakes in some of the companies backed by the administration, the records show. Many of those investors had given to Obama’s 2008 campaign.”
The most famous debacle of this politically-connected money machine was Solyndra. Before it finally went bankrupt, Solyndra took the taxpayers for $535 million.
Less famous, but more outrageous was Ivanpah. Nominally a solar energy plant, it uses a huge amount of natural gas. In fact, Ivanpah burns enough natural gas to generate a third of the electricity it sells, but it sells all of it at the much higher price commanded by solar power. This bookkeeping alchemy that turns cheap gas-generated electricity into expensive solar electricity was plenty lucrative, but the Obama-Biden help-the-weak stimulus package piled on with a $500 million grant and a $1.6 billion loan guarantee.
The recipients of this taxpayer-funded largesse read like a who’s who of who didn’t need a subsidy: Morgan Stanley, Chevron, BP Alternative Energy, Google, General Electric, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and on and on.
Since using the same 2009 game plan, we can expect the same results with Mr. Biden in 2020. In fact, the team that boasted about writing his latest plan includes deep-pocketed Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue investors, all with financial bets on renewables. They are in it for the money, and maybe not so much for the environment or the poor.
Here is the lesson: The down-trodden are always invoked, but rarely helped by plans to reorganize industries and the economy. The Obama-Biden Stimulus Package failed on its green-jobs promise but did not fail to deliver hundreds of billions to the well-connected. Do not expect social justice to fare any better with the Biden Climate Plan.
• David W. Kreutzer, a senior economist at the Institute for Energy Research (IER), taught economics for 23 years at James Madison University and for three years before that at Ohio University.
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