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Moving quickly to rebuild the economy through clean energy

Thursday, November 20, 2008
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Labels: Energy Efficiency , Public Policy Blog

4 comments :

  1. UnknownNovember 23, 2008 at 8:46 AM

    How can there be no comments to this post?? Clean, renewable energy is no longer a "green" concept for those who care about the environment (shameful enough to have to "dismiss" that approach).

    It's about the future of the world. Maybe people would care more if it was framed in selfish terms. So...

    This post is about the future of the country that solves this problem (with bold new technologies) first. This pivotal window in time determines the major economic powers of the future.

    Keep leading, good folks at Google. :-)

    All the best,
    Ken Evoy
    Founder, SiteSell.com

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  2. sinz52November 25, 2008 at 1:31 PM

    It didn't take long for conservatives to denounce this Google proposal on energy. From the National Review Online:

    "Put Google firmly in the camp of those who think more government is the answer to everything....

    "Instead, how about this?

    "The private marketplace is better suited than the government to pick energy winners and losers, so government should step back and let the market find the answers to meeting our energy needs in a reliable and affordable manner. Let the market bring technologies online when the economics of the technologies work without handouts and when the technology is truly (and commercially) viable. Repeal subsidies. Avoid mandates. Don’t put a price on a gas that we exhale and that must exist for human, animal, and plant life to continue. Don’t sign on to emission-reduction schemes that will handicap our economy, while doing little, if anything, to control emissions. Tap our nation’s abundant natural resources, and quit letting exploration and recovery efforts get stalled for years in the courts and in the agencies. Build the baseload units, including nuclear-energy plants, that have always met, can still meet — and must exist if we want to meet the bulk of our energy and electricity demand. Be realistic about the current state of, and future prospects for, renewable energies. Recognize that vibrant free markets and a protected environment are not mutually exclusive goals.

    "Sound like a winner to anyone else?

    http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/

    Yep, if America just gives up on reducing noxious emissions from vehicles and industry, and ignores global warming entirely, then it's sure easy to solve our energy problems.

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  3. John ThackerNovember 26, 2008 at 12:59 AM

    With a new President and Congress, we have an unprecedented opportunity to transform our fossil fuel economy to one based largely on clean energy, while creating millions of jobs in the process.

    It may be a good idea to reduce emissions, but surely you can't "create millions of jobs in the process." The jobs analysis on the linked document on the knol is rather unbelievable. It considers only jobs created in the energy sector and associated indirect sectors, and jobs created by "economic expansion based on local spending." But surely this money spent comes from somewhere. There are no estimates for the jobs lost due to redirecting money and efforts from other industries, whether through taxes or just incentives that encourage people to invest money elsewhere.

    The most outrageous part is the assertion that "[t]he estimates are conservative in that they assume a declining job rate in future years due to productivity improvements which might not be realized." Stop and think about what that means. It's an argument that extra jobs might be created because productivity might be lower. But how can lower productivity be a good thing for the economy as a whole? You don't create more net jobs in the economy through lower productivity. Higher productivity can decrease jobs in one sector, yes, but it creates wealth that can be used to invest in other sectors. If the reasoning used in the paper implies that lower productivity means more net jobs, the analysis is badly flawed.

    It's an essentially Luddite argument. One might as well argue that all of Google's advancements in information searching should be prevented or slowed down in order to produce net jobs among librarians. When it comes to its own technology, I assume that most Google engineers realize that higher productivity, while it may reduce jobs in one sector, frees up resources to create them in others.

    Since the analysis wrongly reasons that lower productivity would create more net jobs over the long run, it must be failing to consider the effect on other, non-energy sectors. I must conclude that the net jobs is badly overstated, and that many of these new jobs would be taken from other jobs that might have been created were it not for redirected investment.

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  4. {the scribe}December 3, 2008 at 1:50 PM

    To John:

    "[t]he estimates are conservative in that they assume a declining job rate in future years due to productivity improvements which might not be realized."

    I think it means what it says: A declining job rate due to productivity IMPROVEMENTS which might NOT be realized if... we don't take action.

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