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.
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!
@ur momisugly 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.
@ur momisugly 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?