Spain’s Dr. Gabriel Calzada — the author of a damning study concluding that Spain’s “green jobs” energy program has been a catastrophic economic failure — was mailed a dismantled bomb on Tuesday by solar energy company Thermotechnic.
Says Calzada: Before opening it, I called [Thermotechnic] to know what was inside … they answered, it was their answer to my energy pieces.
Dr. Calzada contacted a terrorism expert to handle the package. The expert first performed a scan of the package, then opened it in front of a journalist, Dr. Calzada, and a private security expert.
The terrorism consultant said he had seen this before: This time you receive unconnected pieces. Next time it can explode in your hands.
Dr. Calzada added: [The terrorism expert] told me that this was a warning.
The bomb threat is just the latest intimidation Dr. Calzada has faced since releasing his report and following up with articles in Expansion (a Spanish paper similar to the Financial Times). A minister from Spain’s Socialist government called the rector of King Juan Carlos University — Dr. Calzada’s employer — seeking Calzada’s ouster. Calzada was not fired, but he was stripped of half of his classes at the university. The school then dropped its accreditation of a summer university program with which Calzada’s think tank — Instituto Juan de Mariana — was associated.
Additionally, the head of Spain’s renewable energy association and the head of its communist trade union wrote opinion pieces in top Spanish newspapers accusing Calzada of being “unpatriotic” — they did not charge him with being incorrect, but of undermining Spain by daring to write the report.
Their reasoning? If the skepticism that Calzada’s revelations prompted were to prevail in the U.S., Spanish industry would face collapse should U.S. subsidies and mandates dry up.
Showing posts with label green jobs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label green jobs. Show all posts
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Italian think tankers find that every new green job costs an economy 6.9 jobs in the industrial sector
A little over a year ago Chris Horner, among others, directed attention to a Spanish study conducted by Dr. Gabriel Calzada of King Juan Carlos University on environmentalism-driven economic incentives, which found that for every "green" job created due to government programs, 2.2 Spanish jobs were destroyed.
Today in Wall Street Journal Europe, Carlo Stagnaro and Luciano Lavecchia of Italian think tank Istituto Bruno Leoni introduce a similar study they conducted in their country, and they determined the employment effect from "green" incentives was more than twice as destructive as Spain's:
...One green job costs on average as much 4.8 jobs in the entire economy, or 6.9 jobs in the industrial sector. The same amount of subsidies that have already been given or committed could produce nearly five times as many jobs if allowed to be spent by the private sector elsewhere in the economy.
Our results are largely consistent with the evidence provided by Professor Gabriel Calzada of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, who found that in Spain, one green job costs on average as much as 2.2 "dirty" jobs. The reason why the Italian figure is more than twice as high is mostly because Italy, unlike Spain, is technology importer, not a producer.
Our figures only seem to confirm what is intuitive: That the green economy may be very profitable for those who receive the subsidies, but that they are detrimental to the overall economy.
Stagnaro and Lavecchia go into a good amount of detail explaining how they arrived at their conclusions.
Today in Wall Street Journal Europe, Carlo Stagnaro and Luciano Lavecchia of Italian think tank Istituto Bruno Leoni introduce a similar study they conducted in their country, and they determined the employment effect from "green" incentives was more than twice as destructive as Spain's:
...One green job costs on average as much 4.8 jobs in the entire economy, or 6.9 jobs in the industrial sector. The same amount of subsidies that have already been given or committed could produce nearly five times as many jobs if allowed to be spent by the private sector elsewhere in the economy.
Our results are largely consistent with the evidence provided by Professor Gabriel Calzada of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, who found that in Spain, one green job costs on average as much as 2.2 "dirty" jobs. The reason why the Italian figure is more than twice as high is mostly because Italy, unlike Spain, is technology importer, not a producer.
Our figures only seem to confirm what is intuitive: That the green economy may be very profitable for those who receive the subsidies, but that they are detrimental to the overall economy.
Stagnaro and Lavecchia go into a good amount of detail explaining how they arrived at their conclusions.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Each government subsidized green job costs 4.8 jobs in overall economy, 6.9 jobs in industrial sector, think tanks find
A new study by a pair of Italian think tankers isn’t likely to be cited any time soon by President Obama or fans of his massive program to force the U.S. economy to move away from fossil fuels to “green” energy produced by renewable resources like ethanol, wind, solar, and biomass.
Carlo Stagnaro and Luciano Lavecchia are researchers with the Instituto Bruno Leoni. They developed a study “to evaluate the effectiveness of green subsidies in job creation. The question we tried to answer is: If the resources currently invested to promote renewable energy were invested in other economic sectors, would more or fewer people have work?”
What they found, according to their summary in European edition of The Wall Street Journal should come as no surprise to anybody familiar with the typical results of government subsidies being used to pick winners and losers in any segment of a free market economy.
“So one green job costs on average as much 4.8 jobs in the entire economy, or 6.9 jobs in the industrial sector. The same amount of subsidies that have already been given or committed could produce nearly five times as many jobs if allowed to be spent by the private sector elsewhere in the economy,” they said.
Those results are consistent with the conclusion of a Spanish researcher who last year calculated that for every “green” job created via Spanish government subsidies, at least 2.2 jobs in the private sector are lost.
The Italian researchers add that:
“What’s often ignored is that the creation of green jobs through subsidies and regulation inherently leads to the destruction of job opportunities in other industries. That’s because any resource forcibly taken out of one sector and politically allocated in favor of renewable energy cannot be invested elsewhere.”
Carlo Stagnaro and Luciano Lavecchia are researchers with the Instituto Bruno Leoni. They developed a study “to evaluate the effectiveness of green subsidies in job creation. The question we tried to answer is: If the resources currently invested to promote renewable energy were invested in other economic sectors, would more or fewer people have work?”
What they found, according to their summary in European edition of The Wall Street Journal should come as no surprise to anybody familiar with the typical results of government subsidies being used to pick winners and losers in any segment of a free market economy.
“So one green job costs on average as much 4.8 jobs in the entire economy, or 6.9 jobs in the industrial sector. The same amount of subsidies that have already been given or committed could produce nearly five times as many jobs if allowed to be spent by the private sector elsewhere in the economy,” they said.
Those results are consistent with the conclusion of a Spanish researcher who last year calculated that for every “green” job created via Spanish government subsidies, at least 2.2 jobs in the private sector are lost.
The Italian researchers add that:
“What’s often ignored is that the creation of green jobs through subsidies and regulation inherently leads to the destruction of job opportunities in other industries. That’s because any resource forcibly taken out of one sector and politically allocated in favor of renewable energy cannot be invested elsewhere.”
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