Now That’s An Argument

A gang of the usual enviro suspects (NRDC, Blue Green Alliance, Sierra Club and Green For All) together with the United Steel Workers and the shrill but lightweight Center for American Progress have been pushing what they describe as a “groundbreaking” report as showing that “millions of workers stand to gain from green industries.” Their hype:

“This report demonstrates that the quickest way to put Americans back to work is through investments in solving global warming, said Dave Foster, executive director of the Blue Green Alliance. “The jobs we’ll create are the very jobs our country is losing in the current recession.”

“This report shows that solving global warming means new investments in jobs and infrastructure, and the reconstruction of our economy,” said Bracken Hendricks, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Sounds fantastic, eh? So presumably this report will detail exactly where those jobs will come from and how many in each state. It could even, if it’s going to be intellectually honest, detail the net cost of the environmental-industrial complex, once all the old “polluting” industries are shut down.

Well, all the report does is identify what jobs will be needed to build the green economy (South Park’s “build a better tomorrow” song may spring to mind), quantify how many people are currently occupied in each of those professions, and then say, “obviously, we’ll need more of them.” That’s it.

I’m convinced.