The Greenwashing of “Green Jobs”
Kitchen-sink accounting is the only way you can get the distorted and dishonest “green jobs” total the Obama administration just released, something the reporter of this write-up at least concedes by saying that Obama’s definition of a green job is “broad enough to invite some controversy.” Broad is an understatement. A “green job,” according to this boosterish definition, can be any line of work remotely connected to energy, transit or energy efficiency. It could be a city worker who conducts maintenance on the bus system, for instance, or the guy who delivers energy-saving refrigerators to Sears in a diesel-spewing truck. That’s what I mean by kitchen-sink accounting.
It’s a phony number, manufactured to justify a massive waste of money on “green stimulus.” But one can bet that most normally-skeptical reporters will trumpet it as factual and accurate, so enthralled are they by anything that carries the green label. (The Blaze even caught CNN in the act of re-working an earlier, more-honest version of its coverage that apparently wasn’t fawning enough for certain Obama-worshippers in the news department.)
The real story, behind the story, is that the so-called “clean economy” is tiny, ephemeral, largely dependent on government spending – and just not living up to the President’s hype, even after you dishonestly inflate the numbers through kitchen-sink accounting. But you won’t see much about that story in the greenstream media.
How many of these 3 million “green jobs” can this or any previous administration honestly take credit for? How many are relatively permanent, in other words, as opposed to one-shot gigs that vaporize when the funding goes away (like workers in the federal “weatherization” racket)? And how many would survive, as a viable part of the genuine, competitive economy, without government grants, subsidies or mandates keeping them afloat? My guess is that a good percentage of these jobs would go away if they had to stand on their own, without a crutch.
