Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
This story is from the “you can’t make this stuff up” file. Some of our British cousins have figured out a way to solve it all. They have set up the One Million Jobs Caravan, as part of a “Campaign Against Climate Change” … I’m not sure how they plan to stop the climate from changing, but apparently it takes a million people to do it. To fight against CO2 emissions, the backers plan to get into fossil-fueled vehicles and drive, the lot of them, from city to city all around England and Scotland. And then back again.
Now, the numbers out of Spain have shown that for every green job created, two regular jobs were destroyed. And the “green jobs” campaign in the US has been a resounding failure. So I was quite curious as to just how these green jobs were going to be created. I also wondered about the involvement of the trade unions called the CWU, the UCU, and the like.
I found out the campaign backers were proposing to create the jobs the old-fashioned way …
… I cannot improve on their own words …
… the mind boggles … the solution to the UK economic crisis, and the way to end the persistent nuisance of the climate inconsiderately changing all the time, is to add a million “secure, flexible, permanent” union workers building wind farms to the UK government’s permanent welfare rolls.
These folks would be funny if they weren’t so dangerous.
Meanwhile, here in California we just found out that we’re unexpectedly $16,000,000,000 dollars in the hole in this year’s budget, from things like paying union teachers and state bureaucrats and functionaries princely salaries while they are working and then paying them very large pensions for the rest of their lives. Oh, and did I mention business-unfriendly? Eighth year in a row, California was voted worst state to do business in by a poll of CEOs …
However, I hear that there is budgetary hope regarding the California Department of Transportation, which maintains the roads. It seems that they’ve invented a machine that can idly lean on a shovel, promising big savings in labor costs, which is good news … bad news is, I hear the machines have already formed the MWU, the Machine Workers Union, and they’ve stopped leaning on their shovels and joined the One Million Jobs Caravan …
w.
So they work for the government, do what the government tells them to, and, I assume, take what payment the government is willing to give them. I wonder if they get to volunteer for those jobs or if the government can “select” them as needed.
I wonder who gets it worse, the people with the green jobs or the poor sods that keep paying taxes to let it happen?
This is just another example of how education has failed – ultterly and completely – to teach young people about how economies really work. It’s frightening these people get to vote.
At least one driver is needed.
These fossil hating, welfare loving folks with make believe gov jobs would be funny if they weren’t so dangerous.( Nothing more secure than welfare in the UK, my mothers sister and husband made a 3 generation art form out of it)
“This is a new idea.”
WTF? It’s the oldest idea ever, and the one proven repeatedly to have the lowest (read: zero) probability of success. Duh.
I wonder where these nutjobs think the money is going to come from to pay the million workers? From the “new” taxes generated, oh, wait… seems there’s a bit of a conundrum here.
Mark
Our descendants will look back on articles like this and wonder if we somehow poisoned ourselves at the end of the 20th century with an environmental toxin that induces mass stupidity.
One million more government employees within a 12 month period. What could possibly go wrong?
It’s truly sad that supposedly intelligent people couldn’t figure out that government employees take their wages from the general public. And the worst aspect of it is, surely he would have talked with other people about his idea before going to print, yet nobody else saw the flaw in his plan either.
There is a madness gripping the world.
Thats right…the government gets to say how much money it prints so we just print some more, right? /sarc
I am becoming educated about the lack of any appreciation in this section of the political spectrum about how capitalism works…they only understand ….other models.
& 1 wonders why the UK Govt. is broke………..
Economics should be mandatory in high school all the way to matriculation. How can these people be so stupid?
Look at how many old ladies are in that group. It seems these self proclaimed Earth Motehrs think they know all the problems with the planet and can solve it all if we just go back to living in caves
A very clear example of pure Leftist fantasy thinking, with the all-benevolent State conjuring up money (aka taxes) to feed the vanity projects of a handful of halfwits and employ their eager followers to produce worthless goods.
The Age of Stupid, indeed.
Great idea! Get everybody’s home in the UK insulated for the End Holocene. And here’s the payfor (since that wasn’t mentioned). A million workers will be paid from the funds that will surely be coming in from Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland!
And if an ice age does come (or is in the incipient stages now), we will have a million snow shovelers at the ready!
And all of us Californios be sure to vote to have your taxes raised this November! Our guvmint does a Grecian job of managing mint so we need to give them some more mint so they can guv us better (and make some more of that Kool-Aid!).
*Burp*
We now return you to your regularly scheduled propaganda.
And you all wonder why I hate Marxists so much…
If you want to replace a given technology with a new one, you need to eliminate jobs; not create more jobs. Well if your technology is an improvement, all the people whose jobs are eliminated because of the improved efficiency of your stuff, are now available to find a new job, doing something else.
Let local communities pay the teachers. Like they used to. At the ripe old age of 16, a student could become a teacher. By the age of 18, you could be principal. On a teacher salary, you could afford soap. But not a place to live. So you lived with families. The teacher needed to save her pennies for slate boards, chalk and books.
Of course you will need to change the state teacher requirements. You will need to dumb those down considerably. The salary communities can afford will not be attracting anyone beyond a high school diploma.
But there’s socialists for you. Very good at spending other people’s money.
******g idiots.
I don’t know. I’ve been doing environmental management full time and part time in private industry for 30 years. If it weren’t for the government, I’d have had to find honest work.
1 million permanent government workers building high cost windmills and other high cost green delights. Absolutely wonderful. Why not 2 million? We’d stop the climate from changing twice as fast.
Thought this was satire at first:
but NUT seems to be the National Union of Teachers.
I should know better than to eat or drink while reading this site.
“We mean new jobs now. We want the
government to start employing 83,300
workers a month in climate jobs. Then,
within twelve months, we will have created a
million jobs.”
I’ve never snorted sausage and bean out of my nose before…
If the government would just give up their insane war on carbon and develop domestic energy that it owns under federal lands* we could go a long way to solving the energy, economic and budget deficits.
*on second thought, add off shore oil & gas in also
I suspect that even you, Willis, were once young, unsuspecting, naive and unaware of the ways of the World. Having the government [who is in control of printing the money by the way] create jobs that employ you and your like minded friends in your chosen green career path is one of those amazing aha! moments that can only come out of being caught a little too long in the smoke of a burning hemp field…,
DesertYote says:
May 14, 2012 at 5:28 pm
And you all wonder why I hate Marxists so much…
=========================================================
I just finished a 5(6) part series…..”How I Know”, and this one is “how I know enviroclimate goons are Marxists”………. http://suyts.wordpress.com/2012/05/14/how-i-know-the-enviroclimate-goons-are-anti-capitalist-marxists/ —- simply put, it is because they told us they were. There’s about 20-25 quotes of them extolling wealth redistribution and hating on capitalists.
It is incredible when one thinks about it. At nearly the precise moment we thought we were banishing this plague upon humanity, much of the world was embracing another version of it. Except worse if the Malthusian Marxist misanthropists had their way.
Post-modern – described by John Watkins Chapman in the 1870’s
Post-industrial – Described by Daniel Bell in 1973
Post-literate – Coined by my NZ wife in 1992 when she arrived in California
Post-sentient – Coined by me in 2005 watching An Inconvenient Truth
Post-evolution – devolution or retrograde evolution, coined here and now.
The Million Man March started all these million entities not standing still events.
One thing you don’t hear much about was the ill fated Million Microbe March. This was to protest their exclusion from the endangered species act. It was all very sad – someone accidentally autoclaved the petri dish.
When the wagon is in the ditch, shoot the horses and hire more drivers.
One day our children, or out children’s children, will look back with a little pride at the fact that CAGW sceptics stayed online and kept active. Hats off to WUWT, Climate Audit et. al.
When is this SCAM going to end? How many times does Flannery have to be proven wrong? How many more LIES do we need to hear from Gore and Pacharui? How many more past temperature adjustments do we need from the astronomer James Hansen? How many more times do will we hear of an ice free Arctic next year?
The CAUSE is lost, they cannot win, even at the end of the “hottest decade on the record”!
Finally, I just want Warmists to think honestly about just three things:
Whatever happened to Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming?
Whatever happened to Catastrophic Anthropogenic Runaway Global Warming?
Why Climate Change? (it is in the very nature of climate to change)
A million workers at–let’s say–$40,000 or equivalent each: that’s $40,000,000,000 (forty billion dollars) in salary alone. How many people live in the UK? Divide that $40B by the number of families that get the bill; add in the health care and other benefits and perquisites of all these million jobs; and let us know in a few years how long the UK can remain solvent.
In the picture, what is that green thing that woman is holding? Is that a watermelon?
I am sorry, and I will understand if you moderate this post. But I have to say it:
Spending tax payer money to build stuff that won’t work is a travesty. These people, when they get access to the public checking account simply do not know how wealth is created.
But doing what they suggest would have been a good alternative to the stimulus.
It ain’t gonna happen—- is it?????
“We mean government jobs! This is a new idea!”
New Idea??? Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clintoon, and Barack Obama would all contest the ‘new idea’ meme!
On the flip side, What could go wrong? It ‘worked’ soooooo well for Comrade Stalin and the Soviet Union, as well as Chairman Mao and communist China?! Right?
I see brain dead people….and they don’t even know they’re brain dead….
Sooner or later there are going to be more government employees (Blood suckers) that there are workers and the whole Ponsi scheme will collapse. We seem to be at that point already.
“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. ” ― Margaret Thatcher
This economic model has been tried before.
It’s called Greece.
Every few generations, you just default on your national debt and start all over again.
Not to worry. The EU is imploding as we speak, with the prospect of civil wars in the near future. All this kind of nonsense will evaporate soon as reality steps in.
Growlzler says:
May 14, 2012 at 5:43 pm
Indeed I was, Growlzler, indeed I was, but look at the age of the folks in the photo … lots of grey hair and graybeards …
w.
Dr. John M. Ware says:
May 14, 2012 at 6:09 pm
In rough numbers, there’s about thirty million employed adults in the UK. About a third, or ten million, are already employed by the government.
SO … assuming that the jobs will cost $40,000 per year, and knowing that there are about twenty million private sector workers, that means each private sector worker will have to pay about $2,000 in taxes to support the permanent unionized government windmill builders.
Plus their pensions, of course and various benefits, that’s gotta add maybe 20% to that, call it $2,400 in increased taxes per worker.
Of course, that million new workers will require at least a tenth of that number of bureaucrats to take care of the new million workers … so call it $2,500 in taxes annually to make this happen, from each private sector worker. $5,000 per family if both people work …
My rule of thumb is that everything takes longer and costs more … even if you take my rule of thumb into account. So we’re likely up to $3,000 per person, $6,000 per working couple.
All of this, of course, has ignored one question—who will pay for the windmills and the insulation for the homes? Oh, right, I remember now, the taxpayer. Call that another $500 per taxpayer, we’re up to $3,500 per taxpayer, $7,000 per working couple …
These folks have never learned the most basic rule of economics. There are only three ways to create wealth—mine it, grow it, or manufacture it.
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
May 14, 2012 at 6:24 pm
Growlzler says:
May 14, 2012 at 5:43 pm
I suspect that even you, Willis, were once young, unsuspecting, naive and unaware of the ways of the World. …
Indeed I was, Growlzler, indeed I was, but look at the age of the folks in the photo … lots of grey hair and graybeards …
w.
*
Yeah, I noticed that, too. These are not wet behind the ears youngsters with dreams. Maybe they are actors, hired to inspire folk to “Get out there and Do”. I’m wondering about their plan, though. Nevermind their wages, who pays for the renovations? They want to fix up all the houses, right? Street by street? Even if it worked, it would take a lot of time, but of course it can’t work – I just can’t see them escaping the first street they try it in.
It’s getting so bad we really need Jesus to come back or at least aliens to land here…
The government should just give ever one a job. How cruel it is that they don’t. It should be a good paying job, too; with great benefits, like politicians get. It is only fair and humane. I don’t understand you haters out there who are making fun of this. In fact, they should just pay everyone to do nothing. It is so cruel to ask people to toil all day. And they should make every one a lot more attractive. And we should all be able to fly. That would be cool. And breath under water, and go to Mars if we want.
We woulda have all that, if it wasn’t for evil corporations.
s a r c/off
YES YES YES I love socialism, see anything is possible. Lets employ one more million public workers.. Already 54% of the UK GDP is from the public purse. Add a few more % will not hurt. We can just borrow till the cows come home. A little birdie in the sky says it is ok.
Dr. John M. Ware says:
May 14, 2012 at 6:09 pm
Ah, but I have a solution for the intrepid climateers!
They need to take their climate caravan to Climate Mountain, where the magic climate money trees grow. They can take carbon-neutral baskets and fill them to the brim with climate ca$h – enough for a million jobs!! They can then return to the villages and bless the common folks with sustainable government green jobs. Oh, how glorious! How green! I mean, it’s so good, I must be dreaming…let me pinch myself (ouch!)…
Steve in SC
May 14, 2012 at 6:03 pm
When the wagon is in the ditch, shoot the horses and hire more drivers.
###
Thanks for such a wonderful allegory! My roommates loved it also.
As sad as it is that there are people like that in control of our society, what is really sad is that about half or maybe more of all human beings seem to hold what they consider to be a more moderate version of these beliefs. Left-wing parties win elections OFTEN and even “fiscal conservative” parties are mostly self-identified as fiscal conservatives rather than objectively identifiable as such. Yes, we can blame the leftist media and the leftist education system but in the end we have to lay the blame on human nature. All of the evidence of socialism’s failures is accessible to almost all of the world but humans want power or to be aligned with power (the alpha dogs) and want to think their actions are motivated by compassion. Socialism gives the illusion of both so it is the perfect drug for the human psyche.
OT – LOL
Europe’s manufacturers are rapidly losing ground to US rivals because of soaring energy costs and the failure of the continent’s governments to be “rational” about nuclear power and shale gas, the head of one of the world’s biggest chemicals groups has warned. In an interview with the Financial Times, Jean-Pierre Clamadieu, warned that energy costs should be ranked alongside the eurozone crisis as the most urgent problem confronting industry. –James Boxell, Financial Times, 14 May 2012
I wonder why Governor Jerry Brown didn’t think of it as a way to help California out of their little problem.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/may/12/california-facing-higher-16-billion-shortfall/
Or Greece?
Just keep hiring 1000s of government workers until everyone and everything is OK.
It’s fool proof. The government can print all the money needed for it, the workers spend it back into the economy and much of it comes back in paid taxes.
It’s spontaneous utopia.
If some of the workers were assigned to take care of my huge yard for free I’d be all for it.
OK – Here is the plan. We build factory size gyms across all UK cities each equipped with 1000 cycle machines hooked up to the national grid. A top cyclist can reach 1000 watts output so let’s assume about 200 watts for normal people. So working in 3 shifts our miillion climate change heroes can supply about 70 Megawatts of renewable energy ! They can be paid in carbon credits. This might also help cure UKs obesity problem and save the health service millions. 🙂
Before the system can really collapse, several states will default, receive big aid and loan packages at the expense of those which have not collapsed yet. Some of them may even make a short comeback, or an apparent comeback before collapsing again. It is not when there are too few rich people to fund the scheme that it fails. It’s when there are too few rich nations to bail each other out that it will finally stop. Socialism can destroy any type of wealth it can get it’s hands on so it is literally when all wealth is destroyed that this plague dies out. I’m not looking forward to that very much though.
Tim Minchin says:
Economics should be mandatory in high school all the way to matriculation. How can these people be so stupid?
The folks who dreamed this up are probably graduates of the London School Economics (LSE)!
What bugs me is that there are evidently so many “progressive” libtards that actually believe that the government has an unlimited supply of money to dole out to everyone, irregardless of the state of the economy. Do they not realize that their future (like, uh, their pension) is totally dependent on the health of the economy (and the 1%)? How can so many people be so damn stuuuupid?
I feel guilty feeling happy that California will be our Greece.
Just went to that site Willis. This jumped out at me:
GUARANTEED JOBS!!! No work or competence required.
James Sexton
May 14, 2012 at 5:48 pm
####
Nice collection of quotes.
It doesn’t help that the fraud-in-chief doesn’t understand economics 101, either.
I see dud people.
Simple solution :
Month 1, hire 83,300 people to do survey and site prep for ecologically friendly construction projects.
Month 2, hire 83,300 people to inspect those new sites and find that they do not meet requirements.
Month 3, hire 83,300 lawyers to find out who is at fault for the non-compliance and sue them.
Month 4, hire 83,300 people to return the building sites to their original condition.
Repeat process 3 times a year.
/sarc
Larry
Please put this back in The Onion where it belongs…
I think my dog is smarter than the wiz kids who thought this up…(and my dog ain’t too bright)
listening to: Ozzy Osbourne– “Crazy Train”
The green ‘jobs’ program … a ‘millyun new jobs’ … could it work out like … Soylent Green?
And Soylent Green –
Lifted from wiki:
(Could. Not. Resist. This. Comparison.)
.
Prof Tim Flannery had it right. “In a report to be released today, climate commissioner Professor Tim Flannery said of Western Sydney the region’s temperatures would rise sharply in coming years, leading to violence and more cases of mental illness.”
Just the location was wrong, not Western Sydney but parts of the UK.
yes create 1,000,000 new jobs, with all the quality and efficiency of your favorite hideous bureaucracy….. they don’t even pretend to have a “Five Year Plan” as good as the ol’ USSR, it’s a mere “12 month plan”
“Your Climate Change Bureau, For When Loathing the DMV* Is Not Enough!”
*Dept. of Motor Vehicles, for those whose drivers’ license bureaucracy goes by some other name
1,000,000 “Climate Jobs”. Are there that many empty news desk?
Let’s see, some quick math here. 1,000,000 new useless govmt bureaucrats…. say $40k? avg salary, 1×10^6 x 40k = $40,000,000,000 new wasted dollars (or some equivelance in UK pounds) per year. Cool!
Hey that’s a great photo of the Gillard government!
It’s May, late spring, and I see lots of thick warm clothes being worn. Global warming must be really terrible in the UK.
Wow! Brilliant. Someone finally devised a <perpetuum moneymum.
I am all in with these guys. I will join in and “Campaign against Climate Change Trade Union Group”. I’ll start right now. I proclaim that I am against the “Climate Change Trade Union Group” because they wish to spend people’s hard earned money on creating an unneeded and wasteful bureaucracy.
I am so glad to see that some of the greens and I agree that we should be campaigning against wasteful ideas such as the “Climate Change Trade Union Group”. *whew*
I suspect those green hats they are wearing are lined with tin-foil.
“Willis Eschenbach says:
May 14, 2012 at 6:42 pm”
30 million employed, roughly 50% of the population? I don’t think so. Last statistic I read about the employed, full-time, workforce in the UK in the mid 90’s stated there were about 13 million full-time employed. Of course, I understand the situation could have changed, but it’s unlikely given the economic state of the UK and EU at present.
But tax revenue is collected all the time in the UK. As one example, in 1995, the tax revenue from the road fund license (Tax disk) for private vehicles alone was GBP22 billion (5 billion being “invested” in roads). At the time this “income” represented about ~75% of the GDP of New Zealand.
Just read this:
clivebest says:
May 14, 2012 at 7:10 pm
Pure genius, and you know what, it would be a much more reliable way to generate power than windmills or solar panels. In cold weather, leave the gym windows open and the cyclists will pedal faster to keep warm which will generate more power to meet the higher demand. The more you look into this idea the better it becomes.
Is this something like what happened in China where a core of government employees were dispatched to eliminate the waste of feeding pets? You’d be walking down the street and a van would screetch to a halt and a squad of enforcement officers would fall out of it and club your dog to death at the end of your leach?
Well, now … try watching this without outright alternately laughing and crying:
.
Reality will take a large, sharp-toothed bite out of their butts the first time they pull those million vehicles into a service station and say “Fill ‘er up — all of ’em.”
“Cash or credit?”
“Credit, of course. We don’t have the cash to pay for all of it.”
“Ah. There’s the flaw in your plan, mate.”
Hopefully Dad left Mom enough money for the lens implant.
It’s amazing that these guys get taken seriously. Absolutely astounding.
Well most of those million are probably on the unemployment benefit anyway. So actually why not make them work for their money. I suggest a suitable “green job” would be to set them to chopping up firewood so people can heat their houses when the power goes off. Of course they can’t use chainsaws since those are petroleum driven.They’ll have to do it the old fashioned way using an axe. A year or two of that should teach them a thing or two about the “green” economy don’t you think?
Willis Eschenbach says:
May 14, 2012 at 6:42 pm
Dr. John M. Ware says:
May 14, 2012 at 6:09 pm
A million workers at–let’s say–$40,000 or equivalent each: that’s $40,000,000,000 (forty billion dollars) in salary alone. How many people live in the UK? Divide that $40B by the number of families that get the bill; add in the health care and other benefits and perquisites of all these million jobs; and let us know in a few years how long the UK can remain solvent.
In rough numbers, there’s about thirty million employed adults in the UK. About a third, or ten million, are already employed by the government.
SO … assuming that the jobs will cost $40,000 per year, and knowing that there are about twenty million private sector workers, that means each private sector worker will have to pay about $2,000 in taxes to support the permanent unionized government windmill builders.
——————————————————————————
But all of that money circulates in the economy generating more economic activity and growth which results in more tax revenue to hire more workers thus generating a renewable virtuous cycle.
I could explain more but I have a window someone just broke with a thrown rock to go fix. /sarc
p.s. How long until Krugman renounces his US citizenship and moves to the UK with this plan?
Bob says:
May 14, 2012 at 5:33 pm
I don’t know. I’ve been doing environmental management full time and part time in private industry for 30 years. If it weren’t for the government, I’d have had to find honest work.
1 million permanent government workers building high cost windmills and other high cost green delights. Absolutely wonderful. Why not 2 million? We’d stop the climate from changing twice as fast.
——————————————————————–
Actually windmills create global warming… by slowing the wind and disrupting the flows…
Irony… that which was supposed to curb it creates it and makes it worse…
Ah yes, the broken window philosophy once again ?
Reminded me of this, not new item, in the US ..
It is interesting to evaluate the California influence on entitlement and such in the US on the gov books to boot.
Some would be amazed. . . .
the final denoument of the cannibal feast begins when the doors are flung open and the public is invited for free lunch.
i can almost hear the muffle squeaks of ‘but i didn’t mean this!!!!’
“But all of that money circulates in the economy generating more economic activity and growth which results in more tax revenue to hire more workers thus generating a renewable virtuous cycle.”
the term for this is ‘velocity’ – it’s the monetarist’s latest product to rationalize inflation.
these things are taught in economics 101. that’s how people get the idea – from the university professors who teach it.
nobel prizes in economics are awarded for such ideas.
atilla has always needed a witchdoctor to provide the mumbo jumbo novocain that lets him exsanguinate his prey without much struggle.
The productive in society are being beaten to death bya million butterfly wings.
This idea could actually work. Seriously.
The million new workers just have to agree to accept deferred salaries until such time as the government has enough revenue to pay them back.
Snigger snigger
Everyone can afford One Dollar.
If they get a million people together and each one gives a dollar to one person then that person is a millionaire and no longer has to work, then the person that no longer has to work gives the million dollars to the next person, so far that’s two million dollars of commerce added to the economy, in just 100 days they could move $100,000,000.00 dollars through the economy and since they have all been millionaires none of them ever has to work again.
Since they never have to work again they could then pool their $100,000,000.00 dollars and invest it in a wind farm, this would allow them to double their investment in just 5 years, so in just 5 years (and 100 days) they would have increased the GDP by over $200,000,000.00. And if we adjust the number for inflation the actual increase would be about $159,232,235,382,826,991.02 (if the mint does not run out of paper). This would yield about $345,234,283,982,873.03 in tax revenue for the government.
This would allow the government to give a guaranteed annual income to every citizen of $197,568.07 and No One would have to do any work ever again.
I do try….. thanks!
The gene pool really does need some serious culling. (That’s a joke not a death threat by the way)
Does ” We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us” ring any bells ???
The USA already tried this, its called TSA.
It is a brilliant idea! They could paint all the wind generators green! At only one million pounds per square foot it would barely increase the cost of wind energy ……
Willis Eschenbach says:
May 14, 2012 at 6:42 pm
“All of this, of course, has ignored one question—who will pay for the windmills and the insulation for the homes? Oh, right, I remember now, the taxpayer. Call that another $500 per taxpayer, we’re up to $3,500 per taxpayer, $7,000 per working couple …”
I would say your calculations are a very serious underestimate. Nowadays even in the private sector in the US the overhead factor is probably 140-150% of wages. For the public sector in the UK it would probably be more like 200%. With European standards of vacation and holidays they’re paid for 15-20% of the year for not showing up.
Constructing wind turbines is a high skill, high hazard occupation which would require long and expensive training and, given how reticent most folks are about working hundreds of feet in the air, likely extremely high dropout rates. If they do succeed in dragooning enough stiffs into attempting it, workman’s comp rates will go up faster than Ivy League tuitions. $40K is unlikely to be sufficient enticement for most folks to be wrenching on turbine nacelles 300 feet up either.
From what I’ve seen of the average UK housing there is probably lead paint all over which means the whole process of renovation will have to be done under HazMat conditions, which means more difficult and expensive training, although the delays involved will at least allow the make work jobs to last longer.
Based on data from the stimulapalooza and alt energy subsidies it takes government spending on the order $250K-$500K or more for each new job created and that’s before you take on the continuing costs. Of course, since no one will ever be unemployed again there should be some savings on unemployment insurance, but I suspect increased liability claims and the cost of vesting another million government pensions will suck that up before anyone has a chance to notice.
David Cameron is a wimp and to follow the Green Crass Code is all the proof we debt burdened Brits need. Electricity prices have shot up and until we start using our massive shale gas/coal deposits instead of paying through the nose for overseas energy [and useless on/off wind/solar power fiascos] we will struggle to rise out of our recession struck environment. Thanks David C for helping previous Labour mismanagement bring this country to its knees.
In the UK around 45% of the workforce is directly or indirectly employed by the government and they account for over 50% of the GDP.
We need more government funded ‘green’ jobs like a hole in the head!
Remind me again – what happens after a period of idiotic borrowing, currency collapses, and inflation?
Dr J Ware – who says the UK is solvent? By any measure the UK is already in deep doo-doo. Like the US, the Brit government is printing money to pay the bills. 2 probables – inflation and/or another asset crash – are already in the pipeline – you don’t need a computer model to see this one coming. look for the inevitable slow down in the money supply and then put your head between your knees and kiss your ass-ets good bye. But what the hell – yes – spent more money on stupid schemes, at least the insulation will keep you warm when you can no longer afford that French electricity, because you know, you stopped building coal fired plants, because Hansen said they were bad and he’s, like, this big scientist and Nuclear is sooo uncool except when the French do it, they make everything thats bad-for-you look cool.
There’s only one thing that can improve on this wonderful idea: at the end of each workday (noon, let’s say) each worker gets a soothing massage and footwash from an evil taxpaying entrepreneur conscripted for the task at gunpoint. Aux barricades!
The link supplied quit working for me tonight — I went back to download that incredible article and no pdf!
So I found this link to a similar version:
http://www.capacity.org.uk/downloads/1MillionClimateJobs_2010.PDF
It could even be the same one.
That article has been rewritten for Zaire and other countries so that it looks like it was a unique plan for each country.
Beyond economics, beyond parody, beyond rational debate… compensation as “value for value received” is not a capitalist (sic) but a root Darwinian concept, whereby comparative advantage acts as a survival mechanism.
Beyond a certain point, these lampreys will destroy their host, that is, civil society. And what will Cock Robin do then, poor thing?
ken Methven says:
May 14, 2012 at 5:17 pm
Thats right…the government gets to say how much money it prints so we just print some more, right? /sarc
That’s not /sarc – that’s exactly what’s being proposed.
That’s sad. but true.
One sided maths.
Each of the million will pay 30% tax, thats 12 billion off the 40 billion. then they will pay 10% nhs contribution thats another 4 billion back. thus the net cost is reduced to 24 billion. now all the stuf they fixed needs to be supplied, the suppliers need more workers to make it. They pay tax and the corporation pays tax. So what is the break even ooint.
It is not so simple.
Plus who said the government prints the money. If it did the problem would be much less. But private corporations do!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Willis said:
=============================================================================
Meanwhile, here in California we just found out that we’re unexpectedly $16,000,000,000 dollars in the hole in this year’s budget ….Eighth year in a row, California was voted worst state to do business in by a poll of CEOs …
=============================================================================
… yeah. Proposition 13 really killed California. From flourishing, industrially self-sufficient to bankrupt.
Thanks for this one, Willis. I live in the UK (in Melton Mowbray, where those “porkie pies” are made) but, truly, I haven’t seen this reported here, yet. The comments seem to cover everything one could say, except that a Scottish analysis showed that 2.7 real jobs were lost for every “green” one created.
The Climate Jobs Caravan plan is absolutely doable.
One minor detail is to pay the Green Workers in a new currency called GreenBucks (GG). The government can print GG 50 billion each year, paying each of the first million GW’s GG 50,000 per year. The GW’s can use the GG’s to trade among themselves.
As the number of GW’s increases to include all of the population, the trade in GG’s would include all of the population. Everyone would be employed and very comfortably well off trading with each other at the end of each government workday.
sophocles –
Amy will sort out California:
14 May: Forbes: Amy Westervelt: Why Investors Should Be Paying Attention to California’s Carbon Auction
After numerous attempts to stop its cap-and-trade law (AB32), and more than one delay of the law’s implementation, California is finally preparing for its first carbon auction. The results of that auction–there will be a “practice” auction in August, with the first real auction scheduled for November–are likely to determine the fate of carbon regulation in the United States and, perhaps more importantly, the value placed on carbon in the U.S. marketplace…
Over time, the number of companies included in the cap-and-trade program, and the auctions, will increase, and the number of allocations allotted will be driven down, necessitating further emissions reductions and/or the purchase of more allocations on the market. Some companies and utilities will be looking to buy advance allocations as well–these are allocations priced at today’s market rate, but which cannot be used until 2015. Those companies that know they will need to buy more allocations and want to lock in today’s carbon price may opt to stockpile advance allocations…
There is one remaining political squabble: Under California’s Proposition 13, anything that could reasonably be described as a tax must be approved by two-thirds of voters. AB32 was passed by voters, and Proposition 123, which aimed to kill AB32, was voted down by 62 percent of the state’s voters, but it did not get two-thirds of voters’ approval. That means any money raised by the bill will need to be tied directly to greenhouse gas reductions or else risk being frozen by opponents to cap and trade. While some of the Governor’s initial plans to use the auction revenue to help fund high-speed rail may pass muster, others–namely using the funds to beef up the state’s ailing General Fund–would certainly not.
Irrespective of what happens with the auction’s revenues, however, California is likely to set the stage for federal carbon regulation, no matter who wins the next election or which party controls Congress. “California has put into place the first real market system that lashes the markets to climate change solutions,” says Larry Goldenhersh, CEO of environmental ERP software provider Enviance, which is working with companies such as Valero, Chevron, and PG&E to prepare for the shift in California. ”The results will determine whether we have federal cap and trade in the next five years. It doesn’t matter who’s elected.”…
“There’s been a whole raft of greenhouse gas emissions regulations passed in the last few years and if Obama is elected I think we can expect to see the drumbeat of ever-increasing greenhouse gas regulatory pressure continue,” Goldenhersh says. “By mid-term, industry will demand a national solution that puts a market solution in place. If you were to poll utilities right now, I think you would find that most of them want a price on carbon so that they can pass it on to their rate payers and make a financial plan around this stuff.”
The California experiment will have an impact if Romney is elected, as well, according to Goldenhersh. “If Romney wins I think you’ll see a reluctance to reverse any of the greenhouse gas regulations already in place,” he says. “If you research Governor Romney, yes he said recently that the EPA is out of control and appears to be a tool to crush private enterprise, but he also launched greenhouse gas legislation in Massachusetts, which set a short term goal of reducing greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2010 and which he labeled as the ‘no regrets policy towards climate change.’ He is also on record as saying mankind has contributed to climate change and we need to do something about it. Romney is conflicted on climate.”…
Either way, with many U.S. companies already dealing with a price on carbon in California, plus a patchwork of federal greenhouse gas regulations, Goldenhersh is hearing from his customers that they want some sort of federal, market-based solution…
That’s good news for data management companies like Enviance (and others, such as SAP and OsiSoft), which will be tapped to help companies track and analyze their emissions…
http://www.forbes.com/sites/amywestervelt/2012/05/14/why-investors-should-be-paying-attention-to-californias-carbon-auction/
five minutes ago, there was a single comment calling it a lot of bureacratic hocus pocus, but i guess it has been “called out” by Amy or Forbes, cos it has disappeared.
Amy’s busy SOLVING the climate and travelling!
Amy Westervelt is the Managing Editor of Earth Island Journal and a columnist for SolveClimate. Amy also has written guides for Fodor’s and Great Destinations, and her magazine work has been published in Conde Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, San Francisco Chronicle, Spa and Allure, among others. In 2007, Amy won a Folio Eddie for her feature on the potential of algae-based biofuels, which was published in Sustainable Industries magazine. When she’s not hustling to cover environment or travel stories, Amy’s hiding out in Oakland.
http://www.thefastertimes.com/about/?u=amywestervelt3
In China, a ‘big idea’ like this was known as the Great Leap Forward – one of the most catastrophic economic policies of all time.
And later when China decided to try good old fashioned capitalism……………………………
It being first thing in the morning, when I first saw this I thought it said “Climate Joke Caravan”. After reading the article, I conclude that it should have said that.
Perhaps one day it will again be possible for me not to feel ashamed of my country.
It is easy to make fun of such nonsense. But, we shouldn’t have the jokes let down our guard and try to laugh it away. These people are serious, very serious. Unfortunately, the consequences of their folly is paid for by the hard work of taxpayers. Disturbing.
Oh great! Another crazy idea – and another excuse for a bunch of green zealots to misinform and scare the public…….I despair, I really do…….
Combined wealth of the 1,226 billionaire’s world-wide in 2012 is $4.6 trillion.
Eurostat data shows, the euro-zone government debt totaled 8.215 trillion Euros (24 Apr 2012).
If they took 100% of all the wealth from 100% of the billionaires in the entire world they would still owe over 4 trillion Euros.
They need to start generating inexpensive electricity, re-start mining, forestry and heavy manufacturing and get on with the job of generating wealth like they did 50 years ago; a ‘clean’ service and government employment economy that just moves the same money around in a circle while some it is siphoned off to places that have inexpensive electricity, mining and manufacturing has failed completely.
They have run out of the 50 year old money and ‘Taxing the rich’ is not going to solve it.
we are earth’s “bad houseguests”:
14 May: MSNBC: Stephanie Pappas: Report: Global biodiversity down 30 percent in 40 years
Freshwater tropical species hardest hit, says World Wildlife Fund
Colby Loucks, the director of conservation sciences at WWF, compared humanity to bad houseguests.
“We’re emptying the fridge, we’re not really taking care of the lawn, we’re not weeding the flower beds and we’re certainly not taking out the garbage,” Loucks said. [ 50 Amazing Facts About Earth ]
Related: Most mammals won’t flee climate change fast enough…
But humanity is essentially in debt to Mother Earth, conservationists find…
In other words, it takes the planet 1.5 years to restore what humanity burns through in a year. (The organization Global Footprint Network marks “Earth Overshoot Day” every year to draw attention to how fast humans use natural resources…
In order from most to least, the top 10 greediest resource users per capita are: …
Many of the group’s proposed solutions to humanity’s out-of-control resource use center around Rio+20, the upcoming United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development set for June 20, 2012…
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/47421743/ns/technology_and_science-science/
Tsk Tsk says: “I could explain more but I have a window someone just broke with a thrown rock to go fix.”
It was probably those little bastiats next door.
Instead of the Government paying the 1 million workers in cash they are each going to get a villa in Greece.
This is all imaterial anyway as money becomes a thing of the past, bartering will be the new currency if the perfect storm breaks shore:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/9263196/World-edges-closer-to-deflationary-slump-as-money-contracts-in-China.html
More worryingly, how many people signed the petition? I couldn’t get the link to work.
It’s you American cousins that have a problem, you just don’t understand our English sense of humour.
Frank K. says:
May 14, 2012 at 6:56 pm
Ah, but I have a solution for the intrepid climateers!
They need to take their climate caravan to Climate Mountain, where the magic climate money trees grow….
___________________________
Do you mean this money tree? I think someone else got to it first.
The Campaign Agaianst Climate Change are infamous.
They have a ‘Deniers’ Photo Hall of Shame…..
http://www.campaigncc.org/hallofshame
And they organise activists – Sceptic Alerts, a adaily email to troll sceptical blogs and newspapers comments, most heavily targeted are Bishop Hill, Jamed Delingpole and Christopher Booker.
http://www.campaigncc.org/node/384
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/4/19/skeptic-alerts.html
http://www.realclimategate.org/2010/11/bishop-hill-targeted-sceptic-alerts/
ZT says:
May 14, 2012 at 9:47 pm
Remind me again – what happens after a period of idiotic borrowing, currency collapses, and inflation?
“Change we can believe in.”
500,000 with spoons to dig 100ft holes.
500,000 with spoons to fill in 100ft holes.
Sorted.
Judging by the official photo, the obligatory Head-Tilt of Compassionate Compassion ( http://timblair.spleenville.com/archives/007772.php ) has been supplanted by the Forward-Lean of Mindless Enthusiasm.
Jonathan Smith says:
May 14, 2012 at 8:20 pm
Just read this:
clivebest says:
May 14, 2012 at 7:10 pm
Pure genius, and you know what, it would be a much more reliable way to generate power than windmills or solar panels. In cold weather, leave the gym windows open and the cyclists will pedal faster to keep warm which will generate more power to meet the higher demand. The more you look into this idea the better it becomes.
__________________________________
I have been suggesting something similar for a while now using tread mills and school kids. Cuts the cost of Ritilan too. Think of all those potentially obese kids or kids with ADHD. Lets harness that kid power. If the kid is a discipline problem the teacher can just shift the gears on the kid’s tread mill or exercise cycle and make him work harder for the allotted time. Heck chain them in like they did oarsmen on slave galleys…
@jonathon & Gail
If the work got too boring then half the workforce could be assigned to Plan B: – Methane Capture and Storage – MCS ! The UK government would need to mass produces special diapers for cows, each with a large inflatable balloon to “capture” their rear-end emissions. The half million workers would then be trained to chase the 10 million cows across the british countryside to exchange the full balloons for empty ones ! Natural gas from f**ting not fracking.
Apologies for silliness !
…. and another thing – why are a few blokes wearing hard hats? Has someone let it out that the sky really is falling down?
As has been noted, they wish to create all Government-funded jobs. Notice the sponsors of this? All Unions.
Since Union membership has been drastically reduced, over the past 25+ years, with many Unions amalgamating, leading to loss of jobs for those running them & loss of revenue for the Labour Party (The Unions, via “tithes” from their members, largely fund the Labour Party).
Not absolutely sure, but I think you have 2 studies conflated. The Spanish post-mortem found about 2.2 private jobs lost per green job, but the Scottish and Danish studies found 3.7 per.
Don’t worry the wheels will fall off when they hit some of the pot holes in the British roads, unless they are planning a route that takes them from one Olympic venue to another then they may get a bit further.
James Bull
I wish someone would come up with a figure for all the ‘climate jobs’ that already exist in the UK. I mean all the people responsible in every organisation with a ‘responsibility’ for climate change in their job description. This in itself would be an eye opener.
Then ask….what do they produce ? At what cost… and what difference would there be if they simply evaporated.
BTW, that clause about guaranteeing a job in the scheme to anyone losing his job because of it has dramatic results. Even taking the lowball 2 lost per new gov’t job added, that produces tripling of the scheme each hiring cycle (say, 2 months; original plus 2X as many more). So in one year it goes from 1 million to 3^6 million, That’s 729 million.
Should be enough!!
The Stupid, it burns…
Anthony;
I notice you didn’t get a spot in the Sceptics Hall of Shame. Forward a suitable portrait photo and demand a spot of hono(u)r!
Plus if the million come from the unemployed theres a further saving, about 25% or 10 billion. So not much left to cover. Surprised the capitalists have not checked the simple maths.
Plus note carefully
Socialism is the monopoly of labour. Capitalism is the monopoly of money, same beast different spots. I think the posters mean Free Markets not capitalism. Science demands accuracy, No?
instead of building climate jobs most jobs will be building snow clearing vehicles.( not buy fire but buy ice ) web site
I’d like to apologise to the rest of the world on behalf of every UK citizen with a functioning brain. Please believe me when I say we’re not all as stupid as these numpties.
1 million jobs in a year.
Let’s say average pay is $30,000, add on $20,000 for national insurance, extras, equipment etc etc, that’s $50,000 per job, so 1 million is a little matter of $50bn injection of cash.
If you are building infrastructure, you’re probably spending another $50,000 per job on raw materials, machinery etc etc, so that’s a cool $100bn a year in government funding.
Does this help us?
No it doesn’t, because we have these dotty laws which say that anyone in the EU can come and get those jobs. Anyone. So every time UK taxpayers fund a project, the wages go to Poles, Romanians and others. It’s not the UK’s job to create jobs for Eastern Europeans through the tax system. But the EU says that it is. Strike One for the EU……
If the private sector does it, the money comes from their balance sheet. There’s a lot of cash sloshing around there right now, so they could afford this kind of thing if they thought they could make money from it. They won’t spend it……
There IS a case here, though, to insulate houses really properly and to build new ones as energy neutral. Our housing stock is old, built when King Coal was cheap and we are burning far too much gas heating houses nowadays.
The problem with this country, though, is that people don’t use their brains when looking to sort these things out.
One thing’s for sure, Dr Eschenbach: YOU won’t be sitting on your arse for 5 years waiting for the economy to pick up. It oozes out of every pore of this article. These people may be misguided, but they are not DANGEROUS.
They want the prospect of work for themselves and their kids and if you say that’s dangerous, well, your reputation may be headed a little south……
No worries on funding this, fellas; they can just borrow it from the Greeks in their “new” Drachmas and from the Spanish in their soon to b resurrected Pesos! Then, in a few dozen years, pay it back with a pound of pork pie…
I tried, once, to explain to the spouse and kid that it was completely stupid to have a “Walk For (foo) Cancer”. They didn’t believe me… so I ended up walking a mile or two in a circle around a track at the local school. A couple of hundred folks were busy increasing their skin cancer risk and consuming large quantities of high sugar drinks while mindlessly walking in circles. Toward the end of the day an overly loud band began playing bad renditions of mediocre music.
It was all pronounced a great success.
Why folks could not just give the money and avoid all the mindless consumption and waste of thousands of man-hours and woman-hours and kid-hours of labor is beyond me.
I think it had something to do with everyone feeling “like they had done something” and being sore, tired, and for many sunburnt. Oh, and dirty and smelly too.
So why can’t we just have a grand national “Walk For Money Justice Fairness Sustainable Esteem Development Cure Money” and all take home $100,000 salary for it with full benefits and a pension? It only seems fair…
And we would all feel so good about ourselves and it would cure poverty and bring justice and everything…
/sarcoff>;
But I really do not ken the “symbolic” wasting of resources to “raise awareness” of things that could use the resources that are being wasted…
Then again, I’m trained in economics, owned my own business for over a decade, employed other folks, and do stock trading for my present lunch money. What do I know about how productivity works…
It works out that this is all really easy to figure out.
(1) A job is a green job if it pays money of that color.
(2) A job is sustainable if it doesn’t require a government subsidy to create.
(3) A business that creates the job is sustainable if it has an acceptable return on investment to its stockholders.
I hope I cleared this all up
Playing monopoly, even in real life, only makes you an expert at monopoly. You need to see the bigger picture, the direct connection between carbon credits, oil contracts and fiat money. They are all intangibles, conjured out of thin air. No offense meant, been there done that.
All the pumping, liquidity boosts, QE etc are just smokescreens for “printing money”
Until the highly esteemed and vaunted brain power here realise that, the battle with the watermelons is very far from over.
To set thought in motion, name a truly free market? I think that there is only one and it really tells you what is happening and that is not a scenario the media will tell you.
Have enjoyed the humour here, its needed, but dont forget, solutions are needed, results, ideas.
I think perhaps a less expensive solution would be to send these million folks somewhere everyone *is* employed by the government.
Like North Korea.
Then they can see the consequences of their ideas.
I am informed by a reliable source that I was not this foolish when I was a zygote.
If 1 million idiots stopped breathing for a year it would prevent roughly 1000,000,000 lb of carbon dioxide being expelled into the atmosphere. (Note for warmists – it’s a joke)
Alternatively they could be employed on piecework blowing CO2 into Latro lamps:
“Latro (latin for thief) incorporates the natural energy potential of algae and the functionality of a hanging lamp into its design.
“Breathing into the handle of the lamp provides the algae with CO2, whilst the side spout allows the addition of water and release of oxygen. Placing the lamp outside in the daylight, the algae use sunlight to synthesize foods from CO2 and water.
“Energy is subsequently stored in a battery ready to be called upon during hours of darkness.
Owners of Latro are required to treat the algae like a pet – feeding and caring for the algae rewarding them with light.”
Good Lord, the real Lensmen would be ashamed, were they real.
You’re starting out with a 100% loss, including administration costs. From there it is likely, barring “magic,” that everything you produce from there on out will be at a loss (see hundreds of articles and studies on green power). You don’t “make that up” the initial loss by counting MORE LOSSES against it.
Taxes paid back out of government-paid money can’t put you in the black, they can only (in theory) make you slightly less in the red. In theory, because of the high compliance, enforcement and administrative costs. In practice, you’re probably just adding more losses.
Economic Fallacy (n.) : A policy imposed by politicians on people, from which the latter suffer but the former never learn.
Hello Willis,
I am at present watching Franc24 TV Hollande is getting his medals, a commenter on his new policy says that he wants to create government jobs for the unemployed, Problem : over 50% of the working population does its 35 hours a week for the government, if one tries to open a business in France, problem ! if you employee in France, problem !
Hah, another petition to collect signatures and email addresses of those that don’t think things through or look beyond the media Hocus Pocus. Typical of the Fenton communications style or GetUp puffing their “membership” to weild influence of claiming these as representing their actual political membership, when all they are is a front organisation to be used to fool the media into believing they actually represent something.
Don’t be fooled, or lulled into complacent acceptance. Its akin to the old myth of “consensus of sceintists” (then add your own agenda.)!!
ah misc spelling “scientists” dislexic fingers!!
green = naive and easily deceived or tricked
Grey Lensman says:
May 15, 2012 at 12:49 am
Socialism is the monopoly of labour. Capitalism is the monopoly of money, same beast different spots. I think the posters mean Free Markets not capitalism. Science demands accuracy, No?
____________________________________________
No. Fractional Reserve Banking (Central Banking) is the monopoly of money. Screwing up what “Capitalism” means by confusing it with Central Banking is part of the scam. Capitalism is dead because banker created fiat money drives out wealth based “money”
“Capitalism,” is a system based on individual rights and property rights in which all property is privately owned. It is based on investing real wealth, labor and resources, into creating more wealth which is then traded with others.
The creation of banker printed fiat money acts as a short across the system of capitalism and redirects the created wealth into the pockets of the bankers who neither provide raw materials nor labor to create wealth. It also facilitates monopolization of industry by the “friends” of the bankers who have better access to cheap money where as small businesses normally do not.
Money Is Created by Banks, Evidence Given by Graham Towers
A Primer on Money by the US House Banking and Currency Committee
Mises on Money
Oh, and _Jim, before you trash Mises, here is a speech given by blogger Robert Wenzel in late April to the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Wenzel is an Austrian economist. It is covered at Jo Nova’s site and the whole speech is in Economic Policy Journal.
This quote from his speech is a winner:
One million treadmills will both create energy and one million jobs.
@ Mike Spilligan:
May 14, 2012 at 10:26 pm
“I live in the UK but, truly, I haven’t seen this reported here, yet. ”
I saw this first in a tiny article in the Norwich Evening News nearly two weeks ago. But that’s the only MSM mention I have seen.
These nut-jobs have it all worked out – If you go here: http://www.climate-change-jobs.org/node/14
there are links to a number of PDF downloads with all sorts of calculations and reports, including the full 56 page document linked by Willis (which still works for me as I write this). They have completely fallen for the socialists dream (the movement is partly sponsored by the Socialist Workers Party) – here’s some quotes from the above document:
“No one will lose out. Of course some
people are going to lose their jobs in a low
carbon economy. But a National Climate
Service can have a simple policy. Anyone who
loses their job because of the new economy
will be offered work in the NCS, with
retraining and their old wages guaranteed.”
And:
“The government will save money on taxes
and benefits. When you lose your job, you
pay the government a lot less tax and you
collect more benefits. In the same way, every
unemployed worker costs the government
money. The government gets less tax and they
have to pay out more in benefits.
Individual cases vary. But on average, every
time the government employs someone on
£27,000, they save £13,000 on that person’s
taxes and benefits. That’s £13 billion saved
on a million jobs.”
There you are, problem solved! I intend to pay the caravan a visit – I think I’ll take a printout of the Neta site from this past February, when the UK’s windfarms were producing 42MW out of a total demand of 51,630MW. I’ll back this up with some extracts of Stuart Youngs report on the frequency and coverage of low wind events over the past 4 years. By the way, the home insulation aspect mentioned earlier appears to be compulsory – the report says that whole streets will be “hit” by teams of workers in one go to save on costs.
I thought the Iron Curtain fell 20 odd years ago…
I’m glad my union isn’t on the list.
However, there is something here that is interesting. Taking public money and giving it to people for public works is better than taking public money and giving it to people for doing nothing.
It will discourage sloth.
The Government ought to be on the phone these unions asking for their support in reforming welfare.
The compulsion or starvation is an unfortunate side effect of this reform but a very minimum level for survival could be provided as a safety net out of compassion.
M Courtney says:
May 15, 2012 at 3:13 am
The compulsion or starvation is an unfortunate side effect of this reform but a very minimum level for survival could be provided as a safety net out of compassion.
And then that minimum level would be raised, then raised again — out of compassion.
That *compassion* (i.e., buying votes) is the reason that unfunded obligations in Congressional spending (we haven’t had an actual budget since 2008) now outstrips US military spending.
Tsk, tsk, such cynicism. Especially about the mileage being covered.
That well-known eco-warrior, Jeremy Clarkson from BBC’s Top Gear show proved that trips from London to Edinburgh CAN be green !
He borrowed an Audi A6 and by going at 65mph listening only to BBC Radio2 instead of his thrash metal tapes he managed to drive from London to Edinburgh and back ON A SINGLE TANK OF DIESEL !
There, see ? So if we employed 80,000 people a month to drive taxis between London and Birmingham, we’d create a million jobs and it’d probably still be cheaper than building the HS2 high speed rail link !
“But on average, every time the government employs someone on £27,000, they save £13,000 on that person’s taxes and benefits. That’s £13 billion saved on a million jobs.”
That’s the logic my ex-wife used when she spent $800 on clothes and then declared she had actually *saved* $400 because they were on sale.
Not to say that was the reason she’s my ex, y’unnerstand…
“………It seems that they’ve invented a machine that can idly lean on a shovel, promising big savings in labor costs………..”
I think this applies equally to the CAGW brigade. Willis I must do some work, WUWT is becoming addictive with it’s mixture of strong science and lightheartedness. Wonderful-
The UK is already all but bankrupt. The state has run out of other people’s money. Unfortuneately, there are nut cases who consider that the state can create wealth and that the public sector contributes to the economy rather than serving as a drag on the private sector. If the public sector was truly wealth creating then in theory it would be possible to exempt all those employed in the private sector from paying any tax. If one were to exempt private sector employees from all tax, it is obvious that there would be no money to fund the public sector. This proves that the public sector is a drain and needs to be substantially scaled back in the UK and in all western countries.
If the UK has say 20 million workers (and I am not sure that it has that many) then each worker will have to pay about an extra $2,000 in tax merely to fund the salary. Given the costs of admin and workplace and infrastructure costs, that would probably raise by 50%. Then, and this is a big problem for the UK, there will be unfunced pension rights which will cost every worker perhaps an extra $1000. So annually each UK worker will have to pay an extra $4,000 in tax just to cover this scheme. Of course some workers will pay more and others less depending on their salary and theoretical ability to pay. Since the average UK wage is about $30,000 one can see that the necessary tax rise to fund the scheme will be a substantial slice of that.
Of course, it will not help UK unemployment. Over the past 10 years many many millions of jobs have been created and yet UK unemployment figures remain largely static. The reason is immigration. Over 90% (I recall reading an estimate more in the region of 95%) of all new jobs created in this period has been taken up by immigrants.
Accordingly, this proposed plan would if implemented at best reduce unemployment figures by about 5,000 to 8,000. All the other jobs created would be taken up by the influx of immigration. Economic migrants would be more attracted to the UK if such a silly plan were to be instigated. So the UK would need to build more roads, schools, hospitals etc to provide for these immigrants thereby further costing the UK tax payer.
Sheer madness, but what can you expect of the Unions.
Correction to my post, I slipped a zero.
The 4th para should read:
“Accordingly, this proposed plan would if implemented at best reduce unemployment figures by about 50,000 to 80,000”
Omar Khayyam (via Edward Fitzgerald) had it right:
One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste,
One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste—
The Stars are setting and the Caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing—Oh, make haste!
Unfortunately we have no politician in the UK who will treat these people with the disdain they deserve. ‘The environment’ is now treated like ‘race’ and other sensitive issues. If you demur or disagree on any aspect, you are an evil capitalist/colonialist/racist, and with a PR man as Prime Minister, he ain’t gonna have the cojones to tell them they’re idiots. Don’t forget, even before he was elected, Cameron did the hug-a-huskie schtick in the Arctic, as if showing his green side made him a nice person, the twerp.
Me thinks this would not go down well with the “occupational health and safety” people. You can’t have a million people climbing more than 3 rungs of a ladder above ground without accreditation.
Bill Tuttle says:
May 15, 2012 at 3:31 am
You know, we are very different on either side of the Atlantic.
I thought my comment was incredibly right-wing as it values people for their work (contribution) not their right to be who they feel like (the compassion that lets them live off welfare).
You saw that compassion (that I do value) as being in opposition to the contribution and as a drip-drip-drip ratchet to the left.
I’m not certain who is right but it is interesting to me that we can have such different perspectives on economics yet similar views on the climate science.
I guess science is more empirical and economics more ideologoical.
“This is just another example of how education has failed – ultterly and completely – to teach young people about how economies really work. It’s frightening these people get to vote”
It also failed to teach bankers about how economies work, along with other things they failed to learn such as the legal definition of fraud.
Live on benefits in the UK ?
Not legally. the only way to live on benefits is to work as well, then benefits make useful pocket money. Nobody lives on UK£70.00/wk, which is the unemployment benefit rate…all other benefits are paid to the recipient, like property tax and rent…paid to the council and landlord.
Uk badly off ?
Really….lets see…the treasury printed money to give to the bank off England…which then guaranteed the money to the banks….who didn’t lend it to anyone, just used it to bolster their balance sheet (while claiming tax relief on the losses they had made)….so the government debt is owed to…..the government.
Maybe people should look at the state benefits paid to those with oodles of money….loads of tax relief flying around everywhere…..loads of government subsidy paid to those with enough political clout, who then subsidise the political parties…..a subsidy and benefit roundabout…
Better defined as a benefit and subsidy gravy train…..everyones a passenger.
But there are a multitude of ways to create the illusion of wealth.
And I think your numbers are seriously on the low side both for numbers of government employees and their cost.
grow it – less than 2% employed here
manufacture it – about 12%
mine it – probably wouldn’t even make significant digit.
Ho Hum…
And now you know why the teachers introduced “New Math” in the 70’s.
Robert of Ottawa says:
May 15, 2012 at 3:05 am
“One million treadmills will both create energy and one million jobs.”
I like how you think.
And to keep their energy up, they could eat yogurt made from all that milk that would otherwise be poured down the sink. Also, to improve working conditions, they could drink the corn biofuel instead of using it for cars.
Maybe they are on to something afterall ;o)
loved the comment “These fossil hating, welfare loving folks with make believe gov jobs would be funny if they weren’t so dangerous.( Nothing more secure than welfare in the UK, my mothers sister and husband made a 3 generation art form out of it)”
I find the story truly upsetting. The arrogance is breathtaking. So they want everybody’s money, they want my money, and they also know that they can do a better job with my money than I ever could. They want to take my money, by force, through tax, and waste it, until they run out, and come back for more. Nice try.
This bunch has morality worse than a thug, because thugs don’t pretend to know better, or to be better than you are.
Sad, sad, sad…..
Apologies for not including the link
Those whose sole income and accumulated wealth is derived from tax revenues cannot be net contributors to tax revenues.
State employees could carry ID which allowed them to purchase goods tax free. In addition, they could be excused contributing to National Insurance and Income tax. They would simply be paid sufficiently less so that their spending would buy as much a before. But that would look unfair and make it seem that they don’t pay their share. They don’t and they can’t.
I have sympathy for everyone who has lost jobs.We should not have raised vat to 20 per cent prices are constantly going up and not just on fuel,we should not waste money on trying to tackle climate change though.
I couldn’t help but notice the hard hats.
In their world, all you need to be a worker is “hard hats”.
And yet, they do all they can to get rid of the jobs which really need to wear them.
These people are pretentious, patronising, stupid, bourgeois prats.
And I thought we had it bad in Oz. At least now I feel even better about moving here, despite the lying [self-snip] we have as a prime-minister.
Merovign Misunderstands my post. I am not supporting socialism but science, do the calculations, not knee jerk responses even if in jest. Wllis usually does a good job of that. Then i put forward some ideas for wider consideration in the scientific context, what is the fight really about.
Gail, made a good stab at it, The Banking monopoly of Money and how it operates is what people see or perceive as capitalism and what we all suffer, control and ownership vested in few interlocked mega corporations. Thus my referred choice of “free markets”.. Why do you think that they are so in bed with the Watermelons?
No takers on the market thoughts.
Are these folks from Dorset perchance???
It was about a generation ago that I heard the phrase “You won’t buy Japanese cars with British haircuts”. Some things don’t seem to change.
Perhaps this time round they expect to all become Environment Correspondents for the BBC?
The really worrying thing is….. these people are SERIOUS…!
Willis Eschenbach says:
May 14, 2012 at 6:42 pm
These folks have never learned the most basic rule of economics. There are only three ways to create wealth—mine it, grow it, or manufacture it.
========
Modern banking has invented another. Increase the speed of money. As money moves faster and faster electronically, the same dollar passes from hand to hand many times in a day, until it beomes a blur, giving the illusion that we are all holding the same dollar. As you add more and more dollars, it gives the illusion we are wealthy.
A truck full of council workers arrived at a job site and found they had forgotten to bring shovels. The union foreman phoned the engineers back at base and explained. The engineer said he’d send out 20 new shovels. The union leader said “What will the workers do while they wait?”
“Well”, said the engineer, “I guess they’ll just have to lean on each other.”
Most people have trouble figuring out why it now takes both parents working to support a family, where a generation ago it only took one. Here is the scam that was pulled on working families:
1. Create a “cost of living index”, that measure how much prices go up each year.
2. Condition people to limit wage increases to the “cost of living index”.
So, now if the cost of living goes up say 3% in a year, people will be expected to ask for 3% increase in wages so they can pay their bills.
However, what most peple fail to take into account is that margin tax rates – the tax rate you pay on the final dollar you receive in a year – are close to 50% for middle class working families. So, when you get a 3% cost of living increase, the government takes the first 1.5% as taxes, and the remaining 1.5% goes to the wage earner.
Thus, each year, as the cost of living increases, and you get your raise (if you are lucky) to match the cost of living, you are actually falling behind quickly due to the effects of marginal tax rates. Over time your one salary will not be able to support the same family that your parents could support with only one parent working, and your spouse will have to join the work force for you to be able to maintain the family.
This is the hidden effect of taxes you never hear about. Why both parents need to work in today’s economy just to stay even, where only a generation ago it took just one parent working.
Surely an out and out joke.
No-one could possibly be that silly and incapable of logical thought processes and still be able to function.
My 1st blog “How we slashed household heating & hot water energy use by 73.5% & CO2 by 24%” http://t.co/RyTeRgQA #heatpump #solar
Once again this blog risks crossing the line into the political. I admire WUWT for usually pegging their views on climate science to hard facts and not framing the whole thing in the left- vs- right dichotomy which plagues the debate, skews the science.
Writers on here often dispair of leftist/liberals defaulting to a pro position on AGW – however here you are explicitly aligning yourself with a small statist agenda which undermines your ‘above politics’ credentials. Can you please halt with the economic commentary! This is not your sphere, just as climate science is not krugmans.
I say this not because I think the million jobs lot are anything but idiots ( excuse the triple negative), but you are straying into economic arguments here about the merits and demerits of the state ‘creating’ jobs. As someone with some knowledge of international political economy, and a european, I can tell you it will will you no friends over here to lecture us, from a nation which is growing, on wether or not the state can boost aggregate demand through artificial job creation. They called it New Deal in your country once – though admittedly they had more sense than to build windfarms with it.
This shows that socialism is intertwined with energy and since socialists cannot understand the economy, neither can they understand energy. Instead economic and energy issues are a proxy for some other agenda. By the things they advocate, it is to destroy liberty and prosperity.
A socialist (or a Keynesian, both the same thing), cannot understand how a job is economically justified. They just think if they spend the money, the jobs will come. They never care to understand where the money comes from, or more correctly, where the economic resources come from. In every case however, just as the socialist thinks nothing of waving a wand and creating one million new jobs, they will forever reserve the right to intrude in the economy as they please, to correct and direct, to set wages and prices at the what they think is “fair” at the moment.
Demanding a certain number of jobs to be created or a certain price, is a way of destroying the price that people in voluntary free trade would set.
The economist Ludwig von Mises showed in 1920 [1,2] that since a socialist economy destroys price information via government intrusion, the myriad of participants in the economy are unable to make a fully rational calculation about true profit and loss. Any economic activity that operates at a loss cannot be “sustainable”, a concept the left loves to scold us about, yet cannot really grasp.
Taking another approach, the Nobel economist F.A. Hayek showed that a national economy had such an immense myriad of dynamic economic relationships that no single committee or bureaucracy, no matter how smart or how well staffed, could possibly know enough to direct prices or production levels. His Nobel Lecture [3] was entitled The Pretence of Knowledge. Hayek had previously used this idea as the basis for a very thorough article [4] on the subject, “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”
When these two different withering critiques of socialism are combined, it is easy to see that not only is it dangerously foolish to think that economic decisions can successfully be made by government, but that competing bureaucracies will invariably react to the consequences of intrusions in the marketplace by each other. It would be like trying to control the height of waves on a lake by measuring them from the back of a boat circling in its own wake.
Socialism is also morally bankrupt, for it demands we accept the premise that we can each live at the expense of others, despite how this violates the Commandments that forbid coveting and theft.
[1] Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth by Ludwig von Mises
http://mises.org/pdf/econcalc.pdf
[2] Why a Socialist Economy is “Impossible” by Joseph T. Salerno
http://mises.org/econcalc/POST.asp
[3] The Pretense of Knowledge
http://mises.org/daily/3229
[4] “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review, XXXV, No. 4; September, 1945, pp. 519–30.
http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=92
M Courtney says:
May 15, 2012 at 4:27 am
@ me, May 15, 2012 at 3:31 am
You know, we are very different on either side of the Atlantic.
I thought my comment was incredibly right-wing as it values people for their work (contribution) not their right to be who they feel like (the compassion that lets them live off welfare).
You saw that compassion (that I do value) as being in opposition to the contribution and as a drip-drip-drip ratchet to the left.
We aren’t all that different. I saw your comment for what it was, and agree with that in principle.
However, I have also spent the majority of my life watching venal hypocrites use existing social “safety net” programs and inventing new ones under the umbrella of “compassion” to create three entire generations of people completely dependent on those programs, and in return for that bi-weekly stipend, they dutifully vote for the ones who bestow those checks upon them. I have nothing against giving someone a helping hand until he can get back on his feet. What I *do* object to — vehemently — is giving someone multiple handouts. So many handouts from so many “safety net” programs, in fact, that he enjoys a lifestyle better than mine. And when I raise the question of reforming the system, the same hypocrites who take my tax dollars and redistribute them call me “heartless.”
Now that I think of it, we are very different on our respective sides of the Atlantic — on your side, the pols haven’t yet succeeded in turning “compassion” into a dirty word…
Oh brother; here we go again (mods, I apologize in advance for minor transgressions or infractions I may draw in making this post) ….
Tragically, when one’s ‘financial education’ (re: banking et al) begins with the fictional and entertaining works by G. Edward Griffin, we are apt to see all manner of ‘extrapolations’ into the absurd, and from one who appears somewhat rational and factual on some subjects.
Maybe a little refresher on the ‘background and history’ of banking and banking practices is called for, and rather than a reliance on the many dry, textual sources out there, perhaps something with a more little more ‘flow to the narrative’ will do the trick to jump start this trek into a deeper understanding of this subject seeming so ‘foreign’ to so many otherwise smart folk:
Understanding Money & Banking Pt. 1:
And with that, I will refrain from any more off-topic/non-subject-specific posts on this thread.
.
Keep in mind….. This is the crowd it’s appealing to…
http://l2.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/J45t6dZq5WN1WH1a7XRjBw–/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9aW5zZXQ7aD01MjE7cT04NTt3PTYzMA–/http://l.yimg.com/os/153/2012/05/14/justin-bieber-kevin-winter-getty-images-5-12-12-jpg_200329.jpg
I think we can just all dig two holes, then use the dirt from one to fill up the other. Let’s get the government to pay us to do this. Yay! World Saved!!
The people in that photo and those who sign the petition are parasites. They produce nothing and they impose a huge cost on everyone.
ive been saying it for several years now but this proves me right.
Green really is the new stupid.
“To fight against CO2 emissions, the backers plan to get into fossil-fueled vehicles and drive, the lot of them, from city to city all around England and Scotland. And then back again.”
Sounds like a fun thing to do for a bunch of young people. Unfortunately, what they are up to sounds about as relevent to climate change as rowing to the North Pole – another uniquely British (and silly) stunt.
As far as moving out of California – I moved my small manufacturing business out of California in 2004. Believe me, it was painful moving machinery and people across state lines. It was a good business move, but I must say California is a special place due to the large number of brilliant, energetic people there. They are keeping California going, and you certainly do not hear about them in the media. Sad what is going on in California with the poor governance.
How many economists can we find who would endorse this ‘Million Climate Jobs’ proposal? How many can you find who think the Obama stimulus failed because it wasn’t big enough? How many economists believe we need to increase aggregate demand through government spending.
Simply put, if we mandated economics education, we’re likely to get Social/Fascist (Corporatist)/green economics.
So, maybe the increased CO2 has caused something else. Might it have caused massive stupid.
The problem is these people believe it. They think “breaking windows” to increase business is a good business model.
Reminds me of the lady saying “I’m gonna get me some of that Obama money.”
Obama “stash”
Schools no longer teach what money actually is and how it works.
Thank you for the videos. Classic
Presented whilst guy calmly drives car. inference, simple basic easy, normal.
But is transference, ignores source of money, the root, the control. The gold was soon replaced with gold certificate that soon had a combined face value in excess of the stocks of gold. And so it began.
Put is this way
Capitalist print their own money and charge us for it
Socialist spend other peoples money.
But Still no analysis of the hard sums involved, why does the illusion persist.
oh and what the watermelons do, is not political?
Robert of Texas says:
May 14, 2012 at 5:08 pm
“This is just another example of how education has failed – ultterly and completely – to teach young people about how economies really work. It’s frightening these people get to vote.”
Read up on eugenics, a pseudo-science of the 1880’s clear through the 1940’s. People were sterilized, incarcerated and what have you with the power of government all the way to the supreme court behind false science. Not unlike our green movement today. It was the progressives then, as it is now, and they always take hold of the educational system, then the media and finally the government. By the way, eugenics was attempting to build a pure race and was popular in the US before Hitler latched onto it.
I just finished putting in the garden this past weekend and I learned a way to create 1 million new green jobs: stop using tractors and other gasoline powered machinery in agriculture and use people with hoes and rakes instead.
Because I’m cheap, I decided not to use any gas powered machines to put in my garden this year (unlike past years). I only used a shovel, rake, and a hoe. Compared to using a tractor it took five times as long, created a lot more blisters, the results weren’t as good, and I broke the hoe. Lets see how much produce I get.
Next year I’m buying a nice new rototiller for the tractor.
How do you create 1 million jobs?
Well create 83,300 per month for 12 months and hey presto you got a million new jobs.
Why hasn’t anybody thought of this before? Genius! It’s given me an idea. I can become a millionaire in a year. Guess how!
I’m motivated to set up a tautology blog and have this as the first quote.
Strange, visited the web site earlier and visted just now. Seems they have dropped George Monbiot. Cannot find stuff about campaigns on skeptic websites. Also noticed that these fools have stopped talking science.
Total loons, As someone said for these folks climate change is a proxy in there war for a communist society.
In Cuba everyone has a job all Castro does is give everyone a broom, job done. Give everyone the same wage. Then give everyone a ration book because the money is worthless. Strange Cuba is now sacking state employees and allowing free enterprise.
Dr. John M. Ware says:
“A million workers at–let’s say–$40,000 or equivalent each”
Willis Eschenbach says:
“we’re up to $3,500 per taxpayer, $7,000 per working couple …”
Gentlemen, I’d suggest that you have both sorely underestimated the scope of this fiasco. Having been pulled kicking and screaming into working on budgets for a large project being done by the government, I can attest that things are not this cheap.
There are 2080 hours per year in work weeks (52 wks X 40hrs/wk). $40k/yr is not even $20/hr. In gov land, even a new hire clerk with no experience is about $12-15/hr, $24-30K/yr; and the pay scale escalates from there. An engineer or scientist with 10-15 yrs experience can be $100-150K/yr. Project manager $250K/yr (low end estimate, and don’t forget Deputy Managers and Department Managers). Average salaries would probably be closer to $80-100K/yr/person. And those are just salaries.
As Willis notes there is an additional burden (i.e.: “Plus their pensions, of course and various benefits, that’s gotta add maybe 20%”). When you consider vacations, health care, pension, holidays, sick leave, office supplies (computers, xerox, pencils, paper, staplers, etc), and office space and power and maintenance, etc., etc.; it adds closer to 100% for a full time equivalent (FTE). Now up to $160-200K/yr/person
Support staff at 10% also appears underestimated. You need departments of human resources, training, budget, planning, maintenance, IT, quality assurance, etc.. Probably more like 25%.
Then each year, staff would want raises. Also, no bureaucrat worth their salt is happy unless they are adding more staff to increase their fiefdom and expand their power; underlings could be promoted to start their own fiefdoms, etc.
So just SWAGing it, it would probably be closer to more than $10,000/yr/taxpayer. And then increasing each year. But as some watermenlon once said: “No amount of money is too much to protect the environment”. Of course, no one ask this person to immediately sign over all their future paychecks to protect the enviroment.
Dave Ward said:
They have completely fallen for the socialists dream (the movement is partly sponsored by the Socialist Workers Party)
A name from the past! I remember seeing them in University back in the 70s. This scheme is doomed from the start if the Socialist W**kers Party are involved! I saw the Occupy St Pauls people on TV news, while anyone was still paying any attention to them, brandishing posters supplied by these w**kers, and look how that went from strength to strength.
So the Socialist W**kers have found a couple of dozen more useful idiots to feed their fantasy of actually mattering and being relevant, and creating a mass movement that takes over the country. Don’t hold your breath while you wait.
A bunch of useful (useless?) idiots if ever there was one.
ansel61 says:
May 15, 2012 at 12:57 am
Indeed not, and we here in the US assuredly have our own variety of, to use your lovely UK expression, “numpties” … in fact, at the moment one seems to be President …
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
May 15, 2012 at 10:26 am
So, maybe that eugenics thing wasn’t such a bad idea after all, if it could only have predicted who would be producing the “numpties” and sterilized them.
Robert of Texas
“It’s frightening these people get to vote.”
It’s worse than that Robert – we let them breed as well.
The Unions are always good at spending someone else’s money. They seem to think that they can endlessly dip into the public purse and endlessly tax the rich to refill it.
All this against the background of a slowly disintegrating Eurozone and a rapid decline in the UK’s economic position in the world.
So this is how we are to compete with China? Create non-jobs to solve non-problems?
Yeah, that should work.
In England, we know that this is actually a ‘Very Good Thing Indeed’!
83,300 off the dole every month!
[It’s not the ‘dole’ – politicians with no experience of life keep changing its name – but it is recognised as sucking at the taxpayer’s pap, no matter what it is called, even if it is ‘taxpayer-funded freebies for workshy slothful layabouts’.]
That 83,300 will be all the freeloaders, who have lived [as noted, sometimes for genrations] off the taxpayer.
And they’ll be Green jobs – making, transporting, installing, maintaining – and also powering – huge bicycle chains linked to the useless bird-killing windmills that so befoul my native land. no need for back-up gas- or coal- or [dreaded] nuclear-fuelled back-up plant, when you’ve an Army of willing (Oh – so willing; they must be UCW [Union of Communicatoin Workers] and the rest tell us they are!) greenworkers to make those turbines hum.
They’ll get more cash for their efforts, too – albeit the subsidies will have to go to provide that cash. and, by the end of the day, with luck, they may be too tired to think about further procreation of their feckless kind.
It won’t solve the spendaholic Government’s budgetary imbalance; that is running at £5 every day for every person – young and old, in care-homes or kintergardens, native or legal immigrant – in the country. So £140 per family of four each week. every week. Borrowed – in addition to the £559,200 million in taxes and charges government [partly mis-]spends evey year.
If that was all wisely spent – but I digress form the real world!
Oh, and another thing – just outside the Bank of England today – occupying lots of rozzers who might otherwise have been persecuting the harmless motorist, but disturbing those of us unable to join them, as we have jobs, and like to shower most days – was a handful of the same rabble; ‘Occupy’.
Not ‘Build’ – ‘Occupy’. Funny, that. Doubtless co-ordinating their ‘anti-everthing useful including capitalism using smartphones [which the USSR so conspicuously invented and developed and mastered]. Happily they were moved on back to their yurts after a few minutes, so we could get back to the deluge of emails from functionaries that strive to keep anyone from achieving anything useful in this world.
Hints of sarcasm?
Maybe.
clivebest says: May 14, 2012 at 7:10 pm
“OK – Here is the plan. We build factory size gyms across all UK cities each equipped with 1000 cycle machines hooked up to the national grid. A top cyclist can reach 1000 watts output so let’s assume about 200 watts for normal people. So working in 3 shifts our miillion climate change heroes can supply about 70 Megawatts of renewable energy ! They can be paid in carbon credits. This might also help cure UKs obesity problem and save the health service millions. :-)”
Also:-
Gail Combs says: May 15, 2012 at 12:06 am
Jonathan Smith says: May 14, 2012 at 8:20 pm
and others.
Sorry, but the Greenies beat you to this. They have already been peddling (sorry!) your brilliant idea:-
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-06-06/pedal-powered-farms-and-factories-forgotten-future-stationary-bicycle
A mere 1.2 Billion peddlers could produce all the UK’s electricity power needs. That’s 1,200 times as many jobs as these faint-heart namby-pamby union thermageddonists are offering! And check out all the other things you can do with pedal power! The way to go!
Britain can lead the world again!
elbapo says:
May 15, 2012 at 6:55 am
First, our sphere here includes (per the masthead) “puzzling things in life” and “recent news”.
Second, I am not “aligning [myself] with a small statist agenda”, I don’t even know what that is. I am pointing out the utter stupidity of thinking that even if there were a climate crisis, it could be “solved” (to use their word) by the UK government hiring a million new permanent employees.
Third, the climate debate has an unavoidably political side to it, because it is mostly people like those in the “One Million Jobs Caravan” who think a) there is a problem and b) they have the solution to it. In general, it is the left-wing part of societies that have decided that the anti-carbon ideology is a great fit with their underlying agenda. Or as the Club of Rome put it:
Since they have adopted the anti-carbon fight as part of their political doctrine, your idea that politics shouldn’t be discussed merely advances their cause. Sorry, but I’m not the one who turned climate into a political football. If you want to complain about politics in the climate sphere, address your letters to the Club of Rome and people like Gus Hall, head of the US Communist Party, who commented that “”Human society cannot basically stop the destruction of the environment under capitalism. Socialism is the only structure that makes it possible.”
In fact, it is only the successful capitalist societies that have had the money necessary to clean up the environment … but I digress …
Personally, I’m a social liberal and an economic conservative … so which side of your imaginary bicameral universe should I inhabit? I didn’t bring this bunch of bubbleheads up to discuss because I think those folks are liberals.
I brought it up to discuss because I think they’re idiots, very dangerous idiots … and that transcends all political divisions.
w.
Government employment to ‘grow’ the economy reminds me of a perpetual motion machine, except that we don’t have the equivalent of the laws of thermodynamics to point to refute them (or at least nothing as accepted in the poli-sci/economics arena as thermodynamics).
Here’s how you grow the weak economy, drop the idea of a green economy. If small businesses still have money left after paying their energy bill, they are more likely to be in profit and able to hire staff. Drop the BS green taxes on energy bills, drop the additional green taxes on petrol. Small business drive the economy, they employ the most people and they are crippled with unnecessary green taxes and red tape. It’s not exactly rocket surgery.
Tom Goodgame says:
May 15, 2012 at 12:12 pm
“Government employment to ‘grow’ the economy reminds me of a perpetual motion machine, except that we don’t have the equivalent of the laws of thermodynamics to point to refute them ”
As Peter Kovachev says:
May 14, 2012 at 8:09 pm
“Wow! Brilliant. Someone finally devised a perpetuum moneymum.”
And the rebuttal is also in the thread:
Gail Combs says:
May 14, 2012 at 6:18 pm
“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. ” ― Margaret Thatcher
Q: How do you create 1 million jobs?
A: Start with 4 million and put the government in charge.
Climate Jobs are to Jobs as Social Justice is to Justice.
Perpetuum Pecunia Mobile <- Me not know Latin.
If the government gets a "multiplier" of two from giving money to cronies, surely it will be at least twice that from the wonderful schemes of these geniuses. The government can then use the extra money to hire ever more people… Why, they've solved the Great Recession!
@ Davy12 – http://www.campaigncc.org/greenjobs still has right sidebar links to “Sceptic disinformation” & “Climate impacts that are happening now”. The “About Us” page:http://www.campaigncc.org/whoweare
Has George Monbiot, honorary president as the first entry.
@ malcolm – This page is interesting: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004005
“The SWP has chosen as its main vehicle the Campaign Against Climate Change – founded in 2001 in response to president George W Bush’s refusal to sign up to the Kyoto protocol. A king Canute of a name, given that our planet has experienced periodic climatic oscillations and that is it is impossible for human beings to fix the climate at some ideal configuration – continental drift, sunspots, volcanic activity, etc are, and presumably always will be, nature-given.
That aside, SWP members have successfully colonised CACC. They now occupy leading positions: eg, Jonathan Neale is the international secretary and Martin Empson and Suzanne Jeffrey sit on its steering committee
Jim G says:
May 15, 2012 at 11:23 am
So, maybe that eugenics thing wasn’t such a bad idea after all, if it could only have predicted who would be producing the “numpties” and sterilized them.
Horrifying idea, as always. I guarantee you the ‘numpties’ will be the ones making the decisions.
Grey Lensman says:
May 15, 2012 at 5:53 am
Merovign Misunderstands my post. I am not supporting socialism but science, do the calculations, not knee jerk responses even if in jest.
I don’t know that it’s possible to understand your posts, given that you seem to have the gravest difficulty using words as they were intended.
Your calculations are based on assumptions that seem to change on a whim, and certainly don’t seem related to what actually *happens* in markets and when markets are abused.
Thinking that taxes from income derived from government expenditure can offset other government expenditures is just mind-bogglingly thoughtless.
elbapo says:
May 15, 2012 at 6:55 am
Wrong. I am a Brit (forced to be a European) as are a lot of the commentators on here. (though I don’t know how may would agree with the ‘forced to be a European’ bit)
I wonder; do you understand the proposal that no person paid (entirely) by the state pays any taxes ?
In the past I have found it is only socialists who fail to understand this; most Marxists ‘get it’ but to them it is an irrelevance. in the Communist (dis-)utopia there is no separate state; the state owns everything; so there are no taxes.
But socialists with their total lack of understanding of anything more complex of 1+1 = 2 (and they never ever get the joke about binary numbers : there are 10 types of people who understand binary – those who do; and those who don’t) just fail to understand why a state paid employee can not pay tax; in exactly the same way as they fail to understand the concept that a fixed percentage tax means the well paid always pay more tax (10% of 100 is ? 10% of 1000 is ??; which is ‘more’ ?)
For a group of people who mostly appear to be atheists; and believers in ”Nature” they sure don’t understand evolution. They do however behave as though wishes were fishes…and for some reason always deny reality when it contradicts their wishful thinking. Evolution can be so damn slow !
You seem to be unaware that the whole climate scam IS a socialist wet dream; and is driven by those whose politics is invariably left of centre. It is political by its very nature; and it is most definitely economic. The end game of the scam – whether deliberate or not – will be the trashing of the Western (Anglo-Germanic) working ethos and drives; resulting in a 3rd world level of existence for every one. I don’t want my kids working like 13th century peasants thank you very much; with the feudal robber barons fighting amongst themselves over the spoils of Europe.
The climate scam is
aScienctific
Political
Financial
it is impossible to deal with any one of those aspects of it in isolation.
“Meanwhile, here in California we just found out that we’re unexpectedly $16,000,000,000 dollars in the hole in this year’s budget, from things like paying union teachers and state bureaucrats and functionaries princely salaries while they are working and then paying them very large pensions for the rest of their lives.”
There was a time when the government pay and pensions were considered below those offered by private companies. And as the private sector cut their benefits while the government sector didn’t… Now the government plans are “princely” compared to the private sector and everybody in the private sector is complaining about how over paid they are.
What’s wrong with this picture?
They should have called it the “One Million Idiots Caravan” or perhaps the “One Million More Welfare Bums Caravan”.
People this stupid should not be allowed to either vote or run for public office.
elbapo says:
May 15, 2012 at 6:55 am
” As someone with some knowledge of international political economy, and a european, I can tell you it will will you no friends over here to lecture us, from a nation which is growing, on wether or not the state can boost aggregate demand through artificial job creation. They called it New Deal in your country once – though admittedly they had more sense than to build windfarms with it.”
Hi. I’m European. The only economy in the Eurozone that is growing is the German. That’s not because of our renewables craze but an effect of austerity measures created by the social democrat Gerhard Schröder back in 2003, cutting down on unemployment benefits, and of course the fact that we entered the Eurozone by trading our D-Mark for less Euros than it was worth; reducing the wealth of the population while making our car exports more competitive, which essentially wrecked the Italian and French competition and continues to wreck them.
You seem to know little about the New Deal. The best employment effect the New Deal had came through its end.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904787404576532141884735626.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
But at least it gave te US some impressive socialist realism:
and the birth of Modern Art.
“From 1938 to 1942, Pollock worked for the WPA Federal Art Project.[11]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_pollock
which can be produced by a 5 year old:
http://www.aelitaandreart.com/aelitaandreart.com/Home.html
(Well, she actually started when 2 years old)
Reading from their document we see that ….
“In 2009, the Campaign against Climate Change trade
union group – working with academics, climate
activists and several UK trade unions – decided to
fight to make the government create one million
green ‘climate’ jobs. We produced a report ‘One
Million Climate Jobs NOW!’ ”
… and we also find that the document was Published
by the Campaign against Climate Change
5 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DX
in … October 2010 !!!
This is a revamp of the 2011 failed “caravan”
It failed because the whole thing is Hokum and Bogus.
Consider these quotations from the article …..
“We don’t mean jobs with a climate label or a climate aspect”
and also this …..
“We want the government to start employing
83,300 workers a month, in climate jobs”
It is mind-boggling crass ineptitude and simply a FRAUD !!!
That is why it failed in 2011, and will fail again in 2012.
Merovign said
Quote
Thinking that taxes from income derived from government expenditure can offset other government expenditures is just mind-bogglingly thoughtless.
Unquote
As i said, he misunderstood. I was pointing out that the other side of the calculation was totally missing form the posts previous and that to miss them out was unscientific and illogical. ( not praising the socialist scam) Some can add in all the factors and get a “balance”, some such as socialists and Watermelons. The assumptions they make to get that balance, are possibly the same ones they make in their climate calculations and thus prone to the same errors.
I also pointed out that one needed to not only count the beans that they love to spend, but where those beans come from, how they are made, in order to develop a rational scientific response.
Seeing the debate move that way has been gratifying.
DirkH says:
May 15, 2012 at 8:08 pm
The only economy in the Eurozone that is growing is the German. That’s not because of our renewables craze but an effect of austerity measures created by the social democrat Gerhard Schröder back in 2003, cutting down on unemployment benefits, and of course the fact that we entered the Eurozone by trading our D-Mark for less Euros than it was worth; reducing the wealth of the population while making our car exports more competitive, which essentially wrecked the Italian and French competition and continues to wreck them.
That’s why the German Chancellor is desperate for the Greeks to remain part of the Euro, an undervalued deutchmark/euro makes German manufacturing artificially competitive. Truly it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good.
I think you misunderstood, it’s not “green Jobs” it’s Soylent Green Jobs, it’s people!
Who would have thunk it? The solution to energy problems is the SAME as the solution to financial sector crisis: hire 500K government workers to dig holes, and hire 500K more government workers to fill them. IT’S BRILLIANT! To increase efficiency, let each hole be “owned” by each worker. Pride of ownership will inevitably cause workers to dig a better hole, faster, and then fill it up with more zeal, so they can get started digging again. And if you happen by, and see the hole owner lounging on a comfy chaise beside his hole, sipping a lemon flavored adult beverage, listening to his iPod, that will coincidentally be his legally mandated break time between digging and filling.
Merovign says:
May 15, 2012 at 1:52 pm
Jim G says:
May 15, 2012 at 11:23 am
“So, maybe that eugenics thing wasn’t such a bad idea after all, if it could only have predicted who would be producing the “numpties” and sterilized them.
Horrifying idea, as always. I guarantee you the ‘numpties’ will be the ones making the decisions.”
Sarcasm, though I suppose that even though I had posted previously how this was a form of bad science, like global warming, on this site, one really does need to post the “(sarc)” for those who do not read the other posts. However, the numpties would not be making the decisions if they did not exist. (Logic) Perhaps a new tag (log) needs to be associated with logical posts.
Maybe the stop climate change folks could hire this woman
described in this song. Sounds like just what they want/need.
One proviso, I will stipulate they must try it on themselves first.
Why don’t they share this grand solution with the Greeks to stop all the suffering there and then move on to Spain? They are so selfish with their grand ideas and utopian solutions.
Darwinian selection process at work.
These people are too stupid to live. As are the people who enable this paean of ignorance.
Wouldn’t it just be cheaper to pay them to do nothing, on welfare and have them do less damage.
[snip – if you must vent, at least use more polite language! ~jove, mod]
I wonder why all these people are so worked up? The people who thought this up must have visited India and taken the ideas from there. And what’s with all the criticism? You should know that all good (er, can I amend that to ‘good’?) ideas are for you to get money / power / fame and are to be quietly shelved once you’ve got it.
‘Jobs’ can be created out of nothing. Visit Indian public sector behemoths which cannot die – one (xxx Ltd. – name withheld) where workers’ salaries are in arrears for 9 months, which will be paid in part the next time the government prints money while the workers work at outside jobs though still on the payroll! Of course, the poor fellows pay the Government for this privilege along with all their fellow nationals – by means of indirect taxes on every item they buy or consume including food and petrol. Apart from paying through inflation for rubber currency.
The above racist environmentalists who have no visible minorities in the picture in a country that probably has hiring quotas for visible minorities should learn that in the approximately 100 year dry ice industry, there has never been even one recorded case of someone receiving heat burns in the sun from the concentrated C02 gas that certainly according to the climate change propaganda would occur. There has been frosbite though. Your car exhaust tail pipe should glow red in the daytime and be normal at night while driving due to the 14% CO2 level. Why don’t these pseudo intellectuals blame their hypothesis on Argon which I believe is 1% of the atmosphere rather than C02 which is 0.038 of 1%? Of course they have never taken an economics or science course before and who did they say is going to pay for the jobs that will have shoddy workmanship done by whining and lazy people who complain they are being over worked by the management who won’t pay for their sun tan lotion if they have to work outside? Their work will need to be inspected by a huge bureaucracy so little work will progress or will they swing the other way and say their work should be free from government oversight because they are environmentalists unlike what they say about the how the smokestack industries should be regulated?
Stupid is as stupid does.
OMG!!! I think the Mayans were right, this is the end of the world. How can they be that #$%^ing stupid??