Washington
Post editorial writer Charles Lane has a terrific op/ed today
detailing the “Liberals’
Green-Energy Contradictions.” Lane starts out by noting that
wannabe Captain
Planet Al Gore is now a centimillionaire largely as a result of
his “investments” in highly subsidized green energy boondoggles,
er, companies. But Lane explains that helping green crony
capitalists is…

…not the worst contradiction in the Democrats’
doing-well-by-being-green ethos. Green energy is not
cost-competitive with traditional energy and won’t be for years. So
it can’t work without either taxpayer subsidies, much of which
accrue to “entrepreneurs” such as Gore, or higher prices for fossil
energy — the brunt of which is borne by people of modest means.

Consider California’s “net metering” subsidy for solar-panel
users. As the New York Times
reported in June, the program hugely benefits well-off
consumers who can afford to install photovoltaic panels. They get
sun power for their homes — plus an excess supply that utilities
must buy. Thus utilities must also pay to keep them on the grid.
Those costs get passed along to everyone else — including
low-income customers.

For a sense of where this may lead, look at Germany, whose crash
program to replace nuclear power with wind and solar is boosting
electricity rates.
Der Spiegel reports that 200,000 long-term unemployed lost
power in 2011 because they couldn’t pay their electric bills.

Democrats try to square this circle by talking up “green jobs,”
but expensive electricity is bad for industry, as Germany is
discovering. Fact is, subsidies for green energy do not so much
create jobs as shift them around.

Actually, Lane is being way too kind with his “shift them
around” observation – numerous
studies have shown that green energy subsidies kill far more
jobs than they create.For example, as I reported
earlier this year European countries are cutting way back on their
green energy subsidies. Why? 

Because escalating solar subsidies are “a threat to the
economy,” asserted Philipp Rosler, Germany’s minister of
economics and technology. Since 2003 Germany has lavished $130
billion on an energy generation technology that produces just 3
percent of the country’s electricity, boosting consumer electricity
bills by $14 per month. Keep in mind that German consumers already
pay 36 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to an average of about 10
cents in the U.S.

Subsidizing green energy also turns out to be a job killer. In
2010 researchers at King Juan Carlos University calculated that
nearly nine jobs are destroyed in the rest of the economy for every
one created by solar subsidies. Similarly, researchers at
the Bruno Leoni Institute, an Italian think tank, found that
each green job cost five in the rest of the economy. A 2009 report
from the Rhine-Westphalia Institute for Economic Research, a German
think tank, concluded that green energy subsidies were “resulting
in massive expenditures that show little long-term promise for
stimulating the economy, protecting the environment, or increasing
energy security.”

Even as you are reading this blogpost, California is doggedly in
the process of implementing its job-killing Global Warming
Solutions Act (GWSA). The executive
summary [PDF] of a study this past summer commissioned by
California Manufacturers and Technology Association found that the
GWSA:

– lowers California’s 2020 GSP [gross state product] by $153.2
billion, amounting to a loss of 5.6 percent of GSP.

-California will have 262,000 fewer jobs in 2020 because of AB
32 (GSWA).

-By 2020, increased energy prices will increase household
expenses for the average family by $2,500 per year.

Lane ends with an apt quotation from President Andrew Jackson
with regard to government favor-seekers:

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend
the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” President Andrew
Jackson wrote in
1832. “[W]hen the laws undertake to add . . . artificial
distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive
privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful,
the humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics, and
laborers — who have neither the time nor the means of securing like
favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of
their Government.”

As true today as it was 180 years ago.