A recent article in the Huffington Post written by David Foster calls for a higher standard for the jobs created in the United States; if they’re not green, they’re not good enough. Foster writes:
On Friday, the Labor Department announced that the American economy had gained about120,000 jobs in November. A positive number is a good number. But we have to face facts: we aren’t going to put eight million people back to work with a piecemeal approach to our economy. It’s no longer acceptable to sit on the sidelines and hope that jobs will be created and that our economy will recover by returning to an unsustainable pre-2008 economic model. It’s no longer an option to deny the impact of climate change on our economy. We need action to build the industries that will drive our future economy in the United States, and we need it now.
In Durban this week, thousands of people from around the world are gathering to advocate for an agreement that will avert the worst impacts of climate change and help impacted nations adapt. Whether in South Africa or in the United States, the cost of climate change is deep and far reaching. It’s costing us money. It’s costing us economic growth. And it’s costing us jobs.
Foster’s unsettling statements, though elitist and alarmist, are unfortunately vivid in the design of the current administration’s biased behavior. While federal agencies under the Obama administration have supported industries that create the chic new-wave “green jobs,” other jobs are treated as inferior within industries that are “unsustainable.” The obvious targets are the gas and oil industry (i.e. the punting of the Keystone pipeline, hostility towards hydraulic fracturing, “quitting coal” initiatives). However, these jobs that lack environmental sex appeal actually provide sustainable incomes and benefits for the masses. The Wall Street Journal reported an 80% increase from 2003 in the jobs of the oil and gas production, now employing some 440,000 workers. These jobs account for more than one in five of all net new private jobs in that period (Wall Street Journal). The Journal also details North Dakota—the state with the lowest unemployment rate (3.5%)—as having more than 16,000 current job openings in the oil and gas industry, and places like Williston having available jobs that often pay more than $100,000 a year.
The ever-improving capabilities of tapping into oil and gas resources prove these jobs to be formidable for the long-term. The American Petroleum Institute forecasts this real promise of jobs for American posterity:
[W]ith increased access to U.S. oil and gas resources we can create 1 million new jobs in the next ten years alone. To put that in perspective, that would provide enough jobs for nearly every citizen of Rhode Island. A recent study by Wood Mackenzie found that by 2030, nearly 1.4 million new jobs could be added through policies which encourage development of America’s oil and natural resources, and facilitate sands production through the development of Keystone XL and other related pipelines. A few examples are as follows: Development of the Marcellus Shale alone could create 160,000 jobs in Pennsylvania, 20,000 jobs in New York and 30,000 jobs in West Virginia by 2015. The opening of Florida to exploration and development could result in up to 100,000 new Florida jobs by 2016–just with increased access to federal areas within the Gulf of Mexico. U.S. State Department approval of the Keystone XL pipeline could generate nearly 85,000 jobs by 2020.
Despite these findings, the Obama Administration continues to ignore the benefits that come from the expanding diamond-in-the-rough oil and gas sector. With all of Obama’s green industry flops, it is a challenge to grasp what keeps Obama convinced on his path to green righteousness. His $38.6 billion green loan program had created a mere 3,500 jobs over two years compared to his prediction of it “saving or creating” 65,000, jobs. The $500 million Labor Department program funded by the $787 billion stimulus act of 2009 was designed to train workers for green jobs; it was reported only10 percent of participants finding work. The only conclusion to gather from the Obama administration’s inconceivable economic preferences is that jobs without the “green” label are altogether negligible.
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Mr. Foster, there is no answer to climate change as it is an ongoing process. We are in a glacial climate today, the Holocene is interglacial period #5 these past 10,000 years. As long as our polar regions are iced up we are vulnerable to a return of the next 100,000 year Ice Age. Our tropical zone is only 4 deg C warmer now than it was 23,000 years ago at the last glacial maximum. Get over this AGW foolishness. We need to warm up a bit more and we cannot depend on our variable sun. It requires a robust greenhouse gas to prevent our Earth from becoming iced to the equator. All of this talk about keeping us cooler with climate engineering the reduction of CO2 is bound to be dangerously counterprodyuctive.
Mr. Foster, there is no answer to climate change as it is an ongoing process. We are in a glacial climate today, the Holocene is interglacial period #5 these past 10,000 years. As long as our polar regions are iced up we are vulnerable to a return of the next 100,000 year Ice Age. Our tropical zone is only 4 deg C warmer now than it was 23,000 years ago at the last glacial maximum. Get over this AGW foolishness. We need to warm up a bit more and we cannot depend on our variable sun. It requires a robust greenhouse gas to prevent our Earth from becoming iced to the equator. All of this talk about keeping us cooler with climate engineering the reduction of CO2 is bound to be dangerously counterproductive if successful and the world too broke to
meet the challenge of another Ice Age.
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