Yes… no nation dumb enough to let warmism go that far. Carbon trading failed in the EU and the Aussies are preparing to dump their carbon tax. No one else regulates carbon in any meaningful way.
John Abraham and Dana Nuccitelli write in the Guardian:
Krauthammer claims that regulating greenhouse gas emissions will kill “tens of thousands of jobs” and hurt the economy. Of course he provides no evidence to support this assertion – in fact we don’t know the economic impact of these planned regulations, because they haven’t yet been developed. However, studies have shown that EPA regulations generally have a modestly positive impact on the economy and jobs. A national study by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst also found that every dollar invested in clean energy creates two to three times as many jobs as putting that same dollar into coal and oil.
Obviously if you need two to three times as many people to produce the same amount of energy, the productivity per employee has dropped dramatically.
One reason for the high level of manpower needed per unit of energy is that the wind doesn’t blow all the time, nor does the sun shine at night. So the investment in capital is high per unit of energy produced. To produce the capital equipment more workers are needed per unit of energy output. This also increases the labour input per unit of energy output, a further reduction in productivity per employee.
We know that the wages and salaries paid by renewable energy firms is not lower than the market rate. So these workers cost more per unit of energy output by wind and solar plant. The firms are subsidized and so are the workers. Other workers have to pay more to cover the subsidies and thus have less to spend on themselves and their families.
Renewable energy is a huge drag on the economy because everybody suffers except the owners and workers of the businesses that get subsidies.
It would probably be cheaper to pay unemployment benefits to the workers instead of spending it on subsidies for renewable energy.
“A national study by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst also found that every dollar invested in clean energy creates two to three times as many jobs as putting that same dollar into coal and oil.”
This suggests to me that it is much more costly to produce a unit of energy using alternative clean energy technology than it is to produce the same unit of energy from coal and oil. I’m not an MBA, so someone please explain why I’m mistaken.