From the Daily Skeptic
Chris Morrison
The problem with the UK’s green economy, and its damage to the hydrocarbon environment, is that it creates very few jobs. The few remaining “workers” in the governing Labor Party began to spout all the extravagant folly that would further reduce good-paying jobs in their communities. Figures compiled by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which attempt to estimate the actual number of green jobs, are always a highly creative topic and the latest batch is no exception. Many of the jobs identified are simply substitution activities, with one repair or maintenance occupation replacing another. About 6% of that comes from “environmental charities,” which is an interesting way of describing the political funding of elite billionaires pushing net-zero fantasies. There seems to be an urgent desire for green jobs, which the ONS even includes repairing household appliances, controlling forest fires and separating hydrogen through electrolysis that produces carbon dioxide.
The latest ONS “estimates” cover 2021 and 2022, with increases said to have occurred in both years. But as the chart below shows, growth over the decade has been limited, with employment expected to reach 639,000 in 2022, less than 2% of the economy's total employment opportunities.
It can be seen that environmental charities employ 40,000 people, almost as many as the renewable energy industry which employs 47,000 people. But the charity figures do not include all part-time jobs in environmental consultancy and education, or so-called in-house environmental activities. Not if all the jobs that have been replaced, invented or relabeled in areas such as maintenance, electric vehicles, waste management, water treatment, energy efficiency, net zero promotion, teaching and the ubiquitous bureaucracy are rightly ignored More than 150,000 new jobs were created. One might think that the harvest is rather small compared to all the cash that has been sprayed at subsidy-seeking opportunity seekers for at least two decades. Worse, any new jobs could easily be offset by destroyed careers in industries such as steelmaking, refining hydrocarbons, coal mining and oil and gas exploration. Fractured gas will transform many poor areas of the UK, just as it has done in the US, at little environmental cost. But apart from the emerging Reform Party, Britain's main political parties are disgusted by fracking.
The madness around net zero emissions and the so-called green economy got some real pushback last week. The boss of the UK's third largest union, the GMB, told Labour's annual conference that its plans to decarbonise the energy network by 2030 would cost up to a million jobs, kill large numbers of working communities and push the poorest people further of the bill. Smith said the government's net zero emissions plan was “crazy” and “fundamentally dishonest”. A week later, when electricity prices for UK industry and private consumers were revealed to be the highest in the developed world, he accused current energy policy of amounting to virtue signaling from politicians. He accused them of exporting jobs and importing virtues because the jobs were created abroad rather than in the UK
Meanwhile, recently published in science This leads to the shocking conclusion, which will not surprise skeptics, that 96% of climate policies over the past 25 years, ultimately aimed at reducing CO2 emissions, were a waste of money. George Monbiot wrote: “This is what the green spin does us,” although today Guardian's Extremist leaders appear to have given up on all life-enhancing processes that have the potential to disrupt anything on Earth. Skeptical journalist Jo Nova commented: “Finally, George Monbiot says what the skeptics have been saying, 15 years too late and a trillion dollars spent . She said: “Almost every carbon reduction plan is a useless temporary job that gives the illusion that the government is taking action. “
As we have seen, the ONS survey is full of these job-creating schemes, which provide jobs that can only exist by manipulating the free market and delivering dizzying subsidies from consumers and taxpayers. As the more concerned union members see it, much of the cost of these fantasy adventures falls on the poorest members of society, who are forced to pay higher prices for many basic necessities. Furthermore, as we have observed, most green initiatives have found favor with the wider investing public, with RENIXX (a global index of the 30 largest renewable industry companies by stock market capitalization) showing almost zero growth since its inception in 2006. , is important to the crazed Miliband and his wackos at the UK Department of Energy, who are ramping up their ideological agenda to pump money into silly ideas like carbon capture, battery storage and hydrogen production.
But all is not lost when it comes to employment – opportunities must be seized when they arise. Earlier this year, Gary Smith pointed to new job opportunities that could eliminate animal casualties from wind farm blades. “Usually it's one person in a rowboat, cleaning up the dead birds,” he observed.
Chris Morrison is daily skeptic environment editor
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