Guest “Rhetorical question” by David Middleton
If you can’t see why this is hilarious, you probably flunked economics (and basic arithmetic)…
Wind and solar now employ as many workers as the oil sector.
World Economic Forum on LinkedIn
The LinkedIn post is accompanied by a cute YouTube video:
The World Economic Forum, apparently thinks that this is something to brag about. If you can’t see why this is hilarious, you probably flunked economics (and basic arithmetic)…
By the logic of the World Economic Forum, it is a “good thing” that it takes more people to produce and deliver 7% of the world’s primary energy needs, than it takes to produce and deliver 55% (oil & gas).
It’s actually possible that, in 2021, it took twice as many people to deliver than 40 EJ of “green” energy than it took to deliver 330 EJ of “oil sector” energy.
Renewable energy jobs hit 12.7 million globally
New report confirms growth in renewable jobs despite multiple crises and calls for targeted industrial strategies to create stable supply chains and decent jobs.Press release | 22 September 2022
GENEVA (ILO News) – Worldwide employment in renewable energy reached 12.7 million last year, a jump of 700,000 new jobs in one year, despite the lingering effects of COVID-19 and the growing energy crisis, according to a new report.
Renewable Energy and Jobs: Annual Review 2022 identifies domestic market size as a major factor influencing employment generation in renewables, along with labour and other costs. Solar energy was found to be the fastest-growing sector. In 2021 it provided 4.3 million jobs, more than a third of the current global workforce in renewable energy.
[…]
International Labour Organization
Oil and gas production
The ILO estimates that nearly 6 million people are directly employed by the petroleum industry and over ten times that number of jobs are indirectly created by the industry. Employment opportunities for women in the petroleum industry are increasing, but from a very low base. This may be because of harsh working conditions in the industry: long hours work, especially in oil production; increasing amounts of work round the clock, in difficult, remote areas ; scheduling of shifts particularly offshore when rotation patterns are constrained by transport schedules and limits on accommodation. The petroleum industry faces the shortage of skilled workers.
International Labour Organization
Renewables require 300,000 more employees per exajoule of output than the oil & gas industry does. Whenever I see these “triumphant” articles about renewable energy employing more people than fossil fuels, I’m always reminded of the photos of dozens of workers sweeping snow off the streets of Beijing during President Nixon’s historic visit to Red China in 1972.
How can they not see how ridiculous their report was? How do these people keep their jobs?
Progressives think the only reason businesses exist is to employ people. If they make a useful product as well then that’s a bonus. If.
Primary reason = pay taxes
Second = employ
Third = amusement, maybe people getting together
They cannot see how ridiculous they are because they are ignorant. Ignorant to the point of not understanding the ridiculous.
It’s a joke: how many people does it take to change a green, energy efficient lightbulb?
850 employees according to the rooftop solar association and lobbyists and another 5,500 of slave labor (inmates) making polysilicon in western China behind very high fences with guard towers. Plus, another 1,500 at the coal-fired power plant and 4,000 at the Chinese coal mine. Work well and live as they say in the gulag.
I am reminded of the “why not teaspoons” comment by Milton Friedman. Thinking inefficiency is a good thing is perverse.
Milton Friedman…
https://giphy.com/gifs/waynes-world-wayne-campbell-MUeQeEQaDCjE4
Humans had to move beyond hunter-gather before societies could support developing technology for other purposes. Once mechanized farming is destroyed, there will have to be some hard choices between activities that produce and supply power and those that produce and supply food. There may well not be enough people left to do both.
As recently as the 1700’s, 90% of the population lived on farms.
That was before large corporations owned most of the land.
Me too, imagine how many people could be employed using these.
Yes, the modern version of the treadmill. Presumably shift-workers/slaves are required, so that the elite may have continuous power.
French rising star Sandrine Rousseau says we need an anti productivity shock.
“We need less productivity and more people working in agriculture.”
https://nitter.net/franceculture/status/1444318968337080320
Also, Rousseau before her election was teaching economy at a univ.
(Also, univ student unions have Rousseau teaching on Amber alert because she was not teaching.)
Current wind and solar technology, universally applied, condemns the entire human race to trying to extract energy from the wind and sun. The task will gobble up the entire human output in fruitless employment.
The developed countries are able to sustain the illusion by total reliance on China for all of the elements to even start the journey to NutZero. And it only works while China is able to resource the insanity with it currently abundant coal resources with a little help of a few other resource suppliers.
Speaking of employment before the Anthroposin there was a prediction that there would be much smaller numbers of needed producers, others had to find new enterprises. This was due to fossil fuels. You might say that they brought it on themselves except it required other sins.
If you’re good at what you do, why shouldn’t you brag?
Parasites boasting about their success at parasitism might be considered foolish …if they weren’t so obviously succeeding at it.
Wonder if this is even true
How many of these jobs are the door knockers and phone callers trying to convince the gullible to put solar on their roofs or similar bs jobs
I’m plagued by cold-callers too, anything worth having doesn’t need to be flogged so incessantly usually the reverse in my long experience.
Good report, David, and another Reality Check. However, the clueless CAGW crowd will read the World Economic Forum report/watch the infomercial and, being True Believers, continue to make their snarky comments. When it gets cold this winter and the energy isn’t there, maybe a few will wake up. Keep beating the infidels about the head and shoulders with these Reality Checks.
Biden threaten that if Russia didn’t obey, there would be no nord stream 2. ‘We” will see to that. Now there is no nord stream 2. Who will be liable for the many European deaths this coming winter?
Can you document where Biden made this statement? Or is just something else that Putin told you to believe.
According to Germany, the CIA warned them several weeks ago about threats to Nordstream.
Here’s a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVbEoZXhCrM
See Biden video in this article
https://joannenova.com.au/2022/09/nordstream-gas-pipeline-apparently-sabotaged-explosions-and-three-huge-leaks/
What is the overriding mission of the CIA? (hint: disinformtion, by their own admission)
As to who did it, we need to find out who benefits from accusations of sabotage?
Also bearing in mind that the Swedes searched (in vain) for a secret Russian submarine running up to their coast only to find a guy in a small motorboat. I guess if you knew the location, an explosive device thrown overboard from a small fishing boat would do the job just as well as a stealth submarine!
Classic misinformation / misdirection
So ~7.8 million Solar/Wind workers produce 7% of our energy.
And 7.8 million fossil fuel workers produce 82% of our energy.
In other words it takes nearly 12 solar/wind workers to produce
what just one fossil fuel worker produces.
Just think what those extra 11 workers could produce if they
weren’t working solar panels and wind farms? Why they could
be put to work digging holes and filling them up again.
And the 11 worker’s paychecks are enabled by government subsidies while the 1 worker’s salary is not.
“They could be put to work digging holes and filling them up again.”
Sounds Like “Cool Hand Luke”!
Yes “Cool Hand Luke” is where I got that mental image from.
Much as I like comparisons, that 300k more per exajoule is totally meaningless to most people, and a typical tactic of alarmists to MAKE THAT NUMBER ALL BIG AND SHOUTY!!!! reminds me of the “1340000000000000000000 micrograms of ice lost in Antarctica each decade!” type of claims.
Is an exajoule a lot? I’d guess nearly all people have no idea.
Simpler, and far more meaningful to anyone you talk to, just to say each oil and gas employee produces about 57 times as much energy as a renewables employee.
It’s the “common denominator” that BP uses in their annual statistical reviews.
I thought about trying to put exajoule into a meaningful context… But it’s a fracking HUGE amount of energy and I couldn’t identify a meaningful energy-equivalent reference point in the time I could allot to this post
And maybe that’s why everyday people have no idea of the problems.
Enough energy to light all of Los Angeles for 10,000 nights, dusk til dawn?
I’ll see if I can relate exajoules to Hiroshimas, Tunguskas or Chixculubs… 😎
Has to be something easily relatable / experienced by the masses.
As seen in numerous popular movies.
How many Hiroshimas is it?
A lot.
1 exajoule equals ~278 TWh or the equivalent of 164 million barrels of oil or if you prefer, 447719 bopd which is equivalent to…… Wait for it…. WAIT for it… WAIT FOR IT:
0.021 seconds of sunshine on the disc diameter area of planet earth, a disc diameter which is facing the sun and being bombarded by sunshine on that area on a 60/60/24/7/365.25 basis.
(1 kWh/m2 and hour hitting planet earth every hour times 12756200m*12756200m*pi()/4/1700 kWh/boe per hour divided by 60min/hour and 60sec/min.
Peta got it right?
Oddgeir
Its easy:
300EJ is what Old El Sol produces every 700 nanoseconds.
Near as makes no odds, call that “per microsecond”
Strangely, the energy density (as in Watts per cubic metre) in your average garden compost-heap is greater than that of Sol
funny things ain’t they, sols, composts and numbers.
<wonders why the word ‘sol’ is so similar to ‘soil’>
Or ‘soul’, ‘sole’, ‘shoal’ or a dozen different words.
They’re either complete idiots, or honestly wish to send us back to the early 19th century. Really doesn’t matter which of those possibilities might be worse. The results will be equally dismal.
The early 19 century is likely to be a fond, nostalgic memory compared to what may well be coming.
Yes – at least early 19th Century humans were acclimated to living like…early 19th Century humans.
Try that lifestyle on when you’re a “cell phone generation” kid, and things will get ugly really fast.
The only upside of this agenda is that it will drastically thin the population and gene pool of those who have chosen to be economically useless.
They had centuries to adopt to it. Today most people have no useful experience.
It is the plan – destroy Western civilization. They are not idiots.,
The WEF understands currency, stock, and military-political manipulation quite well, thank you, all as instruments of personal gain.
There are jobs and then there are good jobs. The jobs I had at nuke plants were good jobs. In northern climates I heated with wood because I enjoyed it. I figured than the ratio of homes I could heat as part of the team at the nuke plant to cutting and delivering firewood was a 1000 to 1.
I would also suspect that the majority of renewable job is gathering wood or cow pies.
It is like this. After being married many year I was surprised when my wife commented that she did not know I liked doing home improvement projects. I replied that where we use to live I had a sail boat. I would rather be sailing.
I liked working in the nuclear industry and thought I would work until I dropped. Then my wife was hospitalized in Hong Kong. Then I decided I would rather be traveling with my wife full time.
And then there are nut jobs
(not you, I hasten to add)
Some things lead us to major re-evaluations of our priorities.
A world run entirely on solar power would be a perfect circular economy as the energy returned on the energy invested ratio is barely 2 so the entire population could be occupied in the mining of materials production installation servicing and disposing of solar panels. Hooray!
This number for solar excludes any storage or system overbuild. Once those numbers are accounted for, solar panels would need to last 160 years to return their energy.
The term “renewable” is false advertising. There will only be one shot at NutZero and it will be a blank.
EU are already questioning their policy on wind and solar and they have less than 4% of their primary energy coming from wind and solar despite spending hundreds of billions on that stuff.
That last sentence should tell anyone capable of reason everything they need to know about the mirage of “clean energy,” which is not only complete fiction (as in nothing “clean” about it when considered in its entirety), but simply WILL NOT EVER WORK, PERIOD.
WEF is an arm of the octopus of organisations extended from the UN globalists operations headquarters.
David, I do enjoy your articles.
Not defending the green movement by any stretch, but I don’t believe that you’re comparing apples to apples.
The article does not say if the people were employed in delivery of the energy or in the construction phase of building wind and solar sites.
As the number of sites approaches the perceived required number, construction jobs will taper off.
Albeit, by the time they get close to that elusive number, the early sites will need to be replaced.
Just wait for those supply lines
True that… It simply claims that wind & solar employs more people than the “oil sector.” I’ll root through the linked report to see if it more clearly defines anything.
But there’s the rub -constant need to replace the worse-than-useless wind mills and solar panels, because they don’t last very long.
Kind of like construction ‘jobs’ being “created” to dig holes and then fill them. Nothing useful is being done, but if you can find suckers to pay for those ‘jobs’…
The digging holes reminded me of all the water ponds the CCC built that were something like 3-5ft deep.
Despite that, they did do some amazing projects.
Such as Hell’s Backbone Bridge in Utah.
Only 109 ft long, but with a 1500 ft drop on either side.
A crew installed solar panels for a neighbor on a metal structure 40 feet from the house. No one thought to ask where the sewage line went to the drain field. They had to replace a section.
The crew leader looked to be 25 and the other three were younger. They had to know how to operate a wrench and drive to the worksite.
Someone else brought and ran the backhoe.
Compared to most of our college edujamakated youths, they are HIGHLY skilled.
Looks like one other interesting claim was omitted: renewables are suppose to be cheaper than fossil fuels. That’s a clever trick to pull off if you need far more employees to deliver the same amount of product. If they are claiming it is cheaper over the lifecycle, there is only one way to accomplish it; massive layoffs once everything is in place.
OR, salaries for those ’employees’ that are too small to live on.
Worldwide employment in renewable energy reached 12.7 million last year,
Since they are paid by taxpayers (subsidies, feed in tariffs, payment when renewables are ‘off sick’, payment to not produce), this represents a 12million addition to the civil service. Moreover, fossil fuels are the sources of huge tax income for all levels of government which is a ‘subsidy’ to the individual taxpayer (reduces taxes otherwise paid by the individual). Renewables don’t pay taxes in the aggregate.
The real question of what ‘all-in’ renewables cost should be worked out using all these factors.
Forget the economics, which suck, as Eric has had fun pointing out in the post.
Heck! Solar and wind could be produced twice as efficiently as oil and gas and coal, but at the end of the day, the result will still be unreliable energy.
Energy. When you need it, ya gotta have it.
Did they count the children mining cobalt as skilled or not?
Skilled or killed?
Skillz that killz…
https://youtu.be/ZzcXTiVd5gE
Did they count them as green workers ?
Well done “renewable” energy, however:
Oil and gas supports the 6,900 million* globally
(* yes, I know, but you get the point)
🍻
This reminds me of that Pub song: “Ten men went to mow. Went to mow a meadow, Nine men went to mow, ——etc, to One man and his DOG(aka GAS?) went to mow. Went to mow a meadow”, only sung backwards as the gas ran out🤭.😂🤣
La Truss is struggling economics also:
https://mailchi.mp/829008b18fa0/liz-truss-will-fail-without-a-credible-energy-plan-191427?e=b800733722
There have been plenty rants/raves about Biden’s IRA plan which, as best I can tell, works out at about $2,000 per US citizen
It appears, although changing daily, that Truss and Kwarteng will be subsiding each UK household, for 12 months at least, by that much,
UK industry have been presented with an open book of signed blank cheques to cover their energy costs. I **think** that Industrial Electricity will be capped at 21pence (Retail punters/consumers looking at 28 pence now and 33pence starting this Saturday
This will be on top of the £7,000 that Boris blew (printed money = stole from the kids) per UK resident, trying to buy his way out of Covid ##
Biden’s IRA simply pales into nothingness, never mind ‘dodging bullets’, you guys dodged a blizzard of Tomahawk cruisers
## When a simple supplement tablet containing Vitamin B, C, D and Zinc, over 2 years for every UK resident, would have cost less than £5 Billion.
In toto, that little exercise in Paranoid Politics cost over a trillion
Peeps, when we hear about kids going on ‘school strikes’ and becoming suicidal and depressed ‘about the climate’ – somebody is talking Total BS
Yes the kids are scared, but what’s detailed above is actually what’s scaring them – the hideous mental mess of our current crop of leaders, scientists, parents & teachers
The WEF video states that “clean energy” jobs outnumber fossil fuel jobs. Then it says that low carbon generation – mainly solar and wind – employs 7.8 million people globally. It does not give a figure but it says that that is on a par with oil supply. Does that mean that the number of people working in coal and natural gas is negative?
Yep, and they are really highly skilled jobs too, like bolting together solar panels!
I could do that – Gis a job!
And every dollar subsidized by taxpayers. Working for the government is just as non-productive.