Subsidies fail to help sector take root
By Ben Wolfgang
The green-jobs revolution may be going up in smoke.Despite billions of dollars in federal investment and cheerleading from President Obama, even the most ardent supporters of a transformed, job-generating energy sector based largely on wind, solar and other renewable sources acknowledge that their dreams have not translated into reality. The records for other countries chasing green employment opportunities have been equally unimpressive.
Rep. Maxine Waters, California Democrat, told MSNBC last month that, despite impassioned support from liberal Democrats and environmentalists, “green jobs” initiatives “have been about a lot of talk, and not a lot has been happening on that.”
The absence of a promised boom in environmental jobs has become a talking point among Republicans who are campaigning to unseat Mr. Obama in the 2012 election.
Mr. Obama “keeps talking about green jobs,” former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said during the GOP candidates debate Wednesday night. “Where are they? Let’s have real jobs.”
Talk of green jobs was conspicuous by its absence from Mr. Obama’s jobs speech to a joint session of Congress on Thursday night. He gave the address on the same day that the FBI raided California solar-energy company Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy and laid off at least 900 full-time employees.
Where did I see someone say that this would not work? Where did I see someone say that “green” energy would never be able to supply the demand for electricity. Where did I see someone say that Spain’s big plan for “gren” jobs fell flat on it’s face? Where? Right here, that’s where.
You are correct my freind!
Certainly the conservatives’ conception of the social contract isn’t anything like that of J.J. Rousseau, who believed that a just (and sustainable) social order required individuals to sacrifice certain freedoms in exchange for the imperatives of the “general will.” Such sacrifices were deemed a moral obligation.
Ayn Randian Rightys recognize no such obligation, primarily because they don’t recognize the needs—or existence—of others outside their heremetically sealed bubbletopia. Their conception of the “social contract” is Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan pretzeled through a funhouse mirror.
Hobbes famously believed that, absent a strong (authoritarian) legal/political order, human existence in a “state of nature” would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The result would thus be endless social and political chaos: a “war of all against all.”
Of course, the paradox is that while the Rightys believe in “authoritarian” rule for the rest of us (via corporocracy, and its willing enablers in government and media), they fully embrace the notion of untrammeled freedom for themselves via the holy “free” market (with the occasional taxpayer-funded bailout and subsidy when freedom doesn’t pan out).
This have-it-both-ways scenario guarantees that, for many of us, life will indeed become “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” We may be doomed to wage an endless “war of all against all” because we can’t see the real problem: 1% of our “betters”—safely ensconced behind their high-walled communities—have chosen to wage an endless war against the other 99% of us.
The “killer” elite can thus sit back and enjoy the gladiatorial spectacle of the rabble going at one another in a nonstop cage match pitting us against unions, minorities, and whatever other scapegoat happens to stray within range (such as Green Tech/jobs). Good times, good times.
Each form of renewable energy, according to the Fuel Film will be a PART of the solution not the total solution by itself.