Hope, Change, & Lies About Green Energy Jobs

Anyone remember those green energy jobs promises . . .



First came the hope - Obama would create 5 million green energy jobs in the U.S.

Then came the pocket change - Obama promised to spend up to $150 billion to subsidize this new sector.

Now hope and change meet reality.  This from the USA Today:

House Republicans are expanding their probe into the Obama administration's energy programs, investigating $500 million in green job training grants that placed just 10% of trainees in jobs, according to a government report.

The program's goal was to train 124,893 people and put 79,854 in jobs. But 17 months later, 52,762 were trained and 8,035, or roughly 1 in 10, had jobs. Those numbers come from an audit by the Department of Labor's inspector general, which recommended that the administration end the program and return unspent money.

President Obama has made green jobs a cornerstone of his economic agenda. In his first 2012 campaign ad this month, he said clean energy industries created 2.7 million jobs and were "expanding rapidly."  . .  .

The Green energy jobs revolution has been a monstrously expensive left wing fantasy from day one.  Obama's attempt to turn this epic failure into a positive just defies reality - and all of the facts.   

To the extent Obama is claiming that 2.7 million jobs exist in the "clean energy industries," that is an out and out lie.  There are 2.7 million jobs in America that can nominally be defined as "green collar" - but only if you interpret "green" broadly enough to encompass things such as Mass Transit bus drivers, waste water treatment workers, and virtually any job associated with reclamation or recycling.  The vast majority of those positions predated Obama.  Today, "[o]nly 138,000 jobs . . .  - roughly 5 percent of jobs identified - are green energy jobs that actually produce energy (like wind, solar, hydro)"  That's a bit short of the 5 million new green energy jobs that Obama promised.

The reality is that Obama's push for green energy jobs has been every bit the disaster for our nation that his push for green energy itself has been. For Obama now to claim this epic failure as positive marks him as not merely as a facile liar, but as an utterly shameless one.