Using Fossil Resources to Stimulate Growth is Like Stimulating Growth With Debt

[kristopher]

With 2012 election campaign season closing in on us we can expect the trickle of anti-environmental "green-is-too-expensive", "environmentalism-costs-jobs" troglodytes to turn into a strong current if not a flood. This is a snip from an informative and well written article on the topic titled: The Microeconomics of Green Jobs

Using Fossil Resources to Stimulate Growth is Like Stimulating Growth With Debt

Short-term jobs (green or otherwise) should not be the only consideration when forming policy. A short-term focus on jobs today can end up doing long term economic harm. For instance, if we spend too much borrowed money to create jobs today, the long term drag on the economy caused by paying back the debt will leave everyone worse off.

Economic growth fueled by the extraction of non-renewable resources is very similar to economic growth fueled by debt. When we extract these resources and use them, we increase economic activity today, but their non-renewable nature means that we lose the opportunity to extract and use them tomorrow. Hence, the economic stimulus today comes at the cost of an economic drag tomorrow, and the future economic drag will generally be larger than today’s stimulus since improving technology should allow us to get more benefit from each unit of resource in the future.

Using renewable resources to stimulate growth does not have this problem: Tapping the wind or the sun for energy today does nothing to diminish the wind or sun tomorrow. Hence, to the extent a green job relies on renewable resources and a brown job relies on fossil resources, the green job should be preferred, even before taking the environmental benefits into account...

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/10/the-microeconomics-of-green-jobs?cmpid=BioNL-Tuesday-October18-2011

And since it helps to know what policies you want your legislators to support, this is a global overview of the most effective policies that are used to make greeen jobs materialize.
Snapshot of Feed-in Tariffs around the World in 2011
By Paul Gipe
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/10/snapshot-of-feed-in-tariffs-around-the-world-in-2011?cmpid=BioNL-Tuesday-October18-2011

[Tikki]

1. Green energy is going on all around...

every day we see more and more green installations and construction.

Green products sit side by side now with other products on store shelves. Hybrids are everywhere here in Southern California.

In my World it has already arrived.


Tikki