Sunday
Jul142013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Green jobs figures are fiction
Jul 14, 2013 Green jobs David Rose has a short piece in the Mail on Sunday reporting some FOI work by Ben Pile. It seems that the oft-quoted figures for green jobs are almostly entirely fictional.
The LCEGS figures also include billions of pounds from activities which few people would class as ‘green’ – such as water supply, landfill sites for rubbish and, most bizarrely of all – accounting for almost £9 billion – ordinary windows and doors.
Read the whole thing (it's at the bottom of the preceding article by James Delingpole, which is itself well worth a look).
Reader Comments (22)
If the figures are fictitious then there is no reason why they should not be increased to show a massive growth in green jobs before the next general election. Good news for Cameron and Clegg.
Turd polisher?
All government action to create jobs is nonsense, not just action for green jobs.
By diverting resources from the economy in general, to some specific areas, all they do is 'create' some jobs by necessarily destroying others. But of the course the 'created' jobs are more visible, focussed in one area and hence identifiable than the destroyed ones, which occur in diverse sections of the economy and are not so visible or easily identifiable.
This means political capital can be made from the fraudulent claim of job creation; lobbying by the focussed group of beneficiaries - who will be able to easily locate and identify each other - will always be easier than counter-lobbying by the disparate, unfocussed group of victim - who will not be able to identify each other. Indeed they will almost certainly not even realise that that the reason they have lost they jobs, is the 'creation' by government diktat of, eg, green jobs.
Katisha, you can see this effect nicely focused in high streets all round the country, where councils are bloated full of pointless employees, and high streets are crippled by exhorbitant business rates. Town halls next to empty shops.
There's been a massive increase in "Green" jobs.
Think how DECC has expanded to conceive, implement, monitor & control all it's wealth-redistribution schemes that cost ordinary electricity consumers a fortune to Subsidy-Reapers*
*(c) Roger Tallbloke
You cannot build a sustainable economy on subsidies. Subsidies and subsidised industries are a parasite on the real productive economy. In short, they do not create wealt, they merely consume wealth.
Not only are the figures in the green sector grossly exagerated, the article fails to comment upon the fact that real jobs in the productive and wealth creating sector of the economy are being lost. as energy prices escalate, industry becomes uncompetitive. This results in (i) a freeze on wages or low wage increase, (ii) loss of jobs resulting in more redundancies so as to off-set increased energy costs with more efficient productivity, (iii) in extreme cases, factory closures with loss of jobs and loss of corporatation tax (and NI) being paid to the exchequer. This has a knock on effect on the welfare bill (mopre people out of work) and on consumer spending (more unemployed so less disposable income, or less disposaable income because of wage freezes and/or higher energy bills which the consumer has to pay, which factors are hindering a consumer led recovery and therefore further squeezing the service sector).
The UK energy policy is just madness. Not to have learnt from the experience of Denmark and Germany beggars belief. Who in their right mind would close conventionally powered generators and replace them with a series of diesel generators for standby generation?
It is about time politicians and those in senior positions in the civil service were made responsible for their decisions. We will not get better government (which for the main part is simply good management) until those making and implementing policy decisons are held personally accountable for failures in policy and/or implementation.
Is Ben Pile's report available somewhere?
Here in Spain it is accepted that each green job created (at over 1 million Euros each) destroyed 2.2 real jobs. A neighbour reports that as there are now no new jobs in Spain, she has applied for jobs in the UK where there are plenty. Her qualification? Environmental studies.
What I want to know is, why windows and doors are "green" while walls and roofs are not. Funny sort of houses they must live in.
Ruth Dixon 11.59 Jul 14
Suggest asking Roger Helmer
https://twitter.com/RogerHelmerMEP
or
roger.helmer-office@europarl.europa.eu
richard verney
You don't understand. We have to set an example to the poor benighted foreigners, especially those backward chappies in China and India. It's part if who we are and what we do. They rely on us to take a lead.
What I can't get my head round is the idea of a Lib-Dem behaving like an early 20th-century imperialist.
On second thoughts, maybe "setting an example" is built into the English genetic make-up and the eco-warriors just need to tap into that vestige of empire to get their own way.
Or am I being too clever?
It’s a shame that the Mail article doesn’t make clear the real nature of the scandal: that the very definition of a green job is a state secret that has to be prised out of the government via an FOI request. Much government propaganda (and the justifications for it issued by environmentalists) is therefore meaningless. When people voted for green jobs, they didn’t know they were voting for unpaid internships for scavengers on rubbish dumps.
This is surely a question that needs raising with the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee (see previous article here).
More detail, the info I obtained under FOI and my report is available at http://www.climate-resistance.org/2013/07/the-phony-green-economy.html
"We have to set an example to the poor benighted foreigners.."
We do. They just have to look at us and rotate 180 degrees.
Richard North at EU Referendum deals with STOR in some detail.
Here in Ontario, Canada, the government also includes as 'green jobs' any people who are in the following occupations... USED book stores, antiques, second hand stores, consignment services, used record (lp's) stores, used clothing stores... in short, ANYTHING that does not manufacture but sells manufactured goods. These are considered enviro-friendly and as such pad their bogus 'green-job' stats.
PS... also included as 'green-jobs' are the people who sell: safety boots, uniforms, tools, heck even LUNCH'S, DONUTS and DINNERS to ANYONE in the renewable industries... construction workers included!
There has been an urban myth circulating around North America and recently reiterated by Al Gore during his visitation to Toronto that the wind generation industry in the U.S. now employs more people than the coal industry.
It turns out that this is true only if you count absolutely anyone who has anything to do with wind energy (installers, maintainers, operators, managers, secretaries, receptionists, human resources, finance, legal, warehouse personnel, drivers, manufacturers (and all their people), etc.) and compare that sum to the number of people who actually go into the ground to mine coal while ignoring the people who transport and burn coal to produce electricity.
Thank you Ben! Very impressive report.
A close look at any "progressive" organization, especially academic, discloses hordes of positions for non-productive "sustainability" personnel endlessly calculating infinite scenarios of "what ifs", tracing the life cycle of carbon atoms and generating more requirements for more money to expand their scope of operation.
They remind me of aphids.... consuming but not producing.
It isn't fiction, it's lies. There is a difference.
What a mess...
Jeff Norman
Marginally OT — the same trick was used by those pushing the new combi-boilers or condensing boilers, comparing their performance at its most efficient with the old "cast-iron kettles" (as my plumber called them) at their least efficient.
It's a longstanding salesman's trick but it works with politicians because the poor dears always like to be seen as up there in the vanguard of progress and they'll fall for anything new, slightly technical, and shiny bright.