OPINION:
The White House loves to talk about the importance of jobs. The cornerstone of “Bidenomics” may be fairly described as the administration’s desire to spend as much taxpayer cash as possible on measures such as the CHIPS Act or the Inflation Reduction Act, which were supposed to lead us to a bright new epoch of manufacturing jobs here in the United States — with a strong emphasis on manufacturing jobs related to sources of alternative energy.
The promised surge in manufacturing sector employment has been more like a tiny ripple. In February 2020, a few weeks before then-President Donald Trump stood with Dr. Anthony Fauci to announce “15 days to stop the spread” of COVID-19, there were about 12.8 million manufacturing jobs in the United States.
Now, 3½ years later, there are about 13 million manufacturing jobs, which is about 200,000 more than we had before the pandemic. That 1.5% boost is barely more than the rise in population over the same period.
More troublesome for the Biden administration is that the supposed green manufacturing surge is even less than the bare numbers suggest.
A team of economists at the University of Pennsylvania looked more deeply at the data and concluded that “fewer than 1 percent of all workers who leave a dirty job appear to transition to a green job.”
The researchers’ use of the biased term “dirty” to describe the men and women who provide the actual energy that powers America suggests that their sympathies align with those of the administration.
Even so, they couldn’t get the figures to add up, because green jobs have proved quite unappealing.
“We find that the persistence of employment within dirty industries varies enormously across local labor markets,” the Penn researchers noted, adding, “in some states, over half of all transitions out of dirty jobs are into other dirty jobs.”
In other words, hardworking people making a bundle of cash on a rig, in a refinery or at a chemical plant aren’t trading in their livelihood for the cachet of saying that they clean solar panels for a living.
The Penn economists determined that most of the green jobs created to date have been going to sales managers and project developers rather than anyone on the manufacturing end of things. That points to a challenge that the “net zero” crowd will need to address if they hope to make any of their dreams a reality.
If there is to be a manufacturing revolution, it will be driven not by forgiving the college debt of social studies graduates. It would be forged by electricians and welders. The United States may need as many as a million electricians to meet the requirements of an all-electric economy with thousands of added miles of transmission lines.
At the moment, there are about 450,000 electricians. The challenge of finding enough welders will be just as difficult.
If President Biden is serious about powering America with windmills and solar panels, he needs to pivot away from the endless corporate subsidies and refocus public policy toward rebuilding the industrial capacities of the American workforce by persuading the cool kids to learn to weld rather than just learning to code.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.