Feeding the masses on unicorn ribs:
Let me put it this way. A GOP candidate might feel a need to please creationist voters and say a few nice things about intelligent design. That is politics as usual; it gins up the base and drive the opposition insane with fury and rage. No harm, really, and no foul.
But if that same politician then proposed to base federal health policy on a hunt for the historical Garden of Eden so that we could replace Medicare by feeding old people on fruit from the Tree of Life, he would have gone from quackery-as-usual to raving incompetence. True, the Tree of Life approach polls well in GOP focus groups: no cuts to Medicare benefits, massive tax savings, no death panels, Biblical values on display. Its only flaw is that there won’t be any magic free fruit that lets us live forever, and sooner or later people will notice that and be unhappy.
Green jobs are the Democratic equivalent of Tree of Life Medicare; they scratch every itch of every important segment of the base and if they actually existed they would be an excellent policy choice. But since they are no more available to solve our jobs problem than the Tree of Life stands ready to make health care affordable, a green jobs policy boils down to a promise to feed the masses on tasty unicorn ribs from the Great Invisible Unicorn Herd that only the greens can see.
Here in particular Senator Obama as he then was would have benefited from a less gushing, more skeptical press. If his first couple of speeches on this topic had been met with the incredulous and even mocking response they deserved, he probably would not have married himself so publicly to so vain and so empty a cause.
Funny, we warned them about this a couple years ago. But they never learn.
And of course, the sensible among us knew that it would be disaster for sure when the president put an avowed communist in charge of it.
[Update a while later]
Is the global warming hysteria running out of gas?
Where is President Obama, who promised that on his accession “the rise of the oceans will start to slow and the planet begin to heal?” – surely the most fatuous declaration in the history of politics. Well, he appears to be giving speeches every second day, but none of them feature the retreating oceans or our healed planet.
In fact he’s been tooling around in a $2-million bus oblivious of the carbon costs, and there simply hasn’t been any signal that his White House is giving the great Gore crusade anything but the barest of rhetorical support. If there were any political value to ardent greensmanship, surely a President who is floundering on the economy and sinking in the polls would have grabbed that raft with a passion.
But there isn’t anymore. Perhaps the recession has tamed the imaginations of most people and their governments. In tight economic times people are naturally unwilling to engage in the comicbook fantasies of the wilder environmentalists. Perhaps Climategate gave a too-souring glimpse into the mixture of science and advocacy that has, to some extent, corrupted both. Perhaps, finally, the unctuousness, sanctimony and sputtering righteousness of the highprofile environmentalists signal to most observers that they aren’t really as certain of all this “science” as they pretend to be. Either way this long green game has lost its fundamental energies. The celebrities will find another wristband; the politicians will find a new vague distraction.
Let’s hope.
My favorite takeaway from the piece:
“There are perhaps some green jobs that would be exceptions; we could eliminate all forms of welfare and food stamps and offer the unemployed minimum wage jobs pedaling stationary bicycles hooked up to electric generators, solving our budget, poverty, obesity and energy independence problems all at once”
I love it. That’s so crazy, it just might work.
I’ve suggested that in this blog’s comment are before.
An average human can sustain about 125 watts continuous power output. If the entire American workforce were put to work doing this, they could realistically produce about 5 GW continuous power — enough to run Washington DC and New York City until all the cyclists starved to death. And if each were paid the median salary of $46,320 a year (well paying?), it would cost only $178 per kW-hr. What a deal!
This is funny…[[[In fact he’s been tooling around in a $2-million bus]]]
I wonder if the Republicans will eat their words when the Secret Service puts their candidate in the bus in 2012. You see the U.S. Secret Service bought two of them. One for the President and one for the challenger 🙂
And actually the saves money as before the Secret Service was renting buses at a much higher cost given the security and communication requirements they had to meet.
Returning to the subject at hand, see Vanderleun’s comment on the post.
Obama’s green hypocricy was on display yet again this week. His wife and kids just couldn’t wait to get on vacation so they flew to Martha’s Vineyard in a separate jet. Obama flew there in AF1 just 4 hours later. There were also two motorcades, both using a lot of vehicles and both jamming traffic.
If they actually believed CO2 was a danger to the environment, they wouldn’t do things like that. They’d use videoconferencing technology instead of flying AF1 (and the required support aircraft) to an environmental conference. Their actions are directly opposed to what they say. For that, they can kiss my ass.
Not only that, Jardinero, but if we take photos and get some watermelons to pose wearing Nazi uniforms and wielding whips, we could create a bitchin’ documentary.
Mead’s article makes mention of the few allegedly “green jobs” that have actually been created through federal (or state or local) subsidies. For example, $186 million in federal stimulus money created the equivalent of 538 full-time jobs in California.
I think one can argue that these are NOT net new jobs created. As Bastiat would observe, we must also account for that which is “unseen”. How many jobs would have been created if the original $186 million had remained in the hands of those who generated that money in the first place? More than 538, I would suspect, because the private sector gets more for its money than the public sector.
I would offer that the $186 million in California likely resulted in a net loss of jobs, rather than any “new” jobs.
—Tom Nally, New Orleans
I wonder if the Republicans will eat their words when the Secret Service puts their candidate in the bus in 2012. You see the U.S. Secret Service bought two of them. One for the President and one for the challenger.
Far more likely is they bought a second bus as a backup in case something happens with the first one. It may need maintenance, it may be involved in an accident, whatever. It’s common to have a backup. That’s why the Air Force has 2 Boeing 747s for presidential use, not just one. They sure as hell don’t let a challenger ride in the other plane.