But green jobs have become the ginseng of progressive politics: a sort of broad-spectrum snake oil that cures whatever happens to ail you. They are the antidote to economic malaise, an underskilled labor force, the inherent unwillingness of the public to suffer any significant economic and personal dislocation in order to save the environment. They enhance nationalistic vigor. (If we don't act now, the Chinese will steal all of our green jobs!) They stave off aging of stale political platforms. And I'm pretty sure they're good for bunions, too.
While I, like Megan, am obviously in favor of a cleaner Earth, I have mentioned before that instead of wasting tax dollars subsidizing cleaner air methods, the government should incentivize methods to sequester carbon, thereby not limiting economies of current products, but rather encouraging growth into new economies of carbon capture (Follow the back and forth with TPI here and here).
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Alex, let's grant for a moment that spending tons of money on carbon capture is a smarter thing to do than spending an equal amount promoting green jobs. The debate is not between people who are arguing for a green jobs approach and for people who want an equally ambitious clean-energy agenda focused in a different way. The debate is between people who think climate change and associated environmental problems (including ocean acidification and mass extinction) are real and need a robust public response and people who think they are not real and do not need a robust public response.
Maybe a carbon tax is better than cap-and-trade. Maybe opening Medicare to everyone is better than mandate-regulate-subsidize in the area of health care (I'm strongly persuaded it is). But these debates do not take place in a world of unconstrained choices. They take place in a world where there is overwhelming pressure against doing anything related to climate and environmental issues. There is almost always a better alternative to whatever is being proposed--politics doesn't deliver ideal solutions, ever. It's fine to keep alive the critique that Green Jobs are not an optimal policy, but remember that the alternative is not your preferred policy but a policy of doing nothing.
This is something that irritates me endlessly about people like Megan McArdle. She doesn't want to endorse the full-on crazy of climate change denial, but her arguments all tend to support that side.
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