Biden repeated the myth of creating jobs with green energy mandates, an idea thoroughly debunked over a decade ago. It’s classic Broken Window Fallacy thinking and the news media should be ashamed to let it go unchallenged. You can’t just count the jobs required to build and install wind and solar, you must also count the jobs lost elsewhere due to high energy costs and diversion of capital.
The notion that the economy can be grown by paying 3 times as much for energy, thus raising the costs of everything manufactured, especially while China and the developing world suffer no such handicap is so childish that Biden should have choked on the words, and the fact that the claim has not been “fact checked” by the mainstream media shows that journalists are either colosally ignorant or they are hoping the public is.
Since this article appeared, the cost of solar, excluding the required backup at night, has gone down slightly but the cost of wind has gone up as the extremely short lives of the turbine blades have become apparent. Wind also suffers a grave scaling problem as the onshore locations that recover the costs of the turbines are used up pretty quickly.
So, Biden’s Green Energy Jobs program would plunge us into a depression that would leave the US an agrarian vassal of China forever.
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum 
Not again! The Broken Window Fallacy Fallacy.
The cost of producing and storing renewable energy is on a downward track. And that is without an urgent Manhattan Project type investment in technology that would accelerate that trend.
The cost of fossil fuel energy is on an inherently upward track – and that is without a full costing of the damage to the planet, the environment and health that it causes.
So, the underlying postulate of your a priori analysis – that renewable energy is inherently more costly than fossil energy does not match reality. A priori economics that is not grounded in reality is worse than useless because it leads to the “Can’t do” thinking that you are exhibiting.
By the way, that figure of 3x the cost for renewable energy smacks of being one of those famous “alternative facts” we have seen so often in recent years so . . . cite?
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Biden’s own campaign concedes an eventual cost of $6 per gallon for gasoline, 3 X the current price.
And it is not ‘a priori’ as the loss of multiple other jobs for every “green job” has been confirmed throughout Europe. As you would have seen had you read the first cite.
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More sophistry.
Biden’s campaign is not the source of the $6/gallon prediction. That is coming from Trump buddy oil billionaire Harold Hamm. It appears to be self-serving bullshit. But so what. Within a very few years we will all be driving electric vehicles that do not use gasoline.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-22/trump-backing-oilman-hamm-says-6-gasoline-possible-in-biden-win
Secondly, and I think you know this, the ratio between the current depressed price of gasoline versus some possible future price of gasoline has NOTHING to do with your phony premise that renewable energy is 3x as costly as fossil fuel.
You really, really want to be taken seriously but you throw out garbage numbers and then cannot support them. How actually serious is that?
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“But so what. Within a very few years we will all be driving electric vehicles that do not use gasoline.”
Really?
We’re going to replace 18 million cars and light trucks, most of which have at least a decade of useful life remaining with electric cars, at approx $50K each?
That’s 900Billion dollars sucked out of the economy to replace perfectly good vehicles, and while the electric cars might be adequate for city dwellers and suburban housewives to go to the grocery, they will not replace the vehicles people in the countryside need.
And of course the price of gasoline has to go up to make “green energy” work. Artificially raising the price of fossil fuels is the only way to force all electric vehicles on the public, otherwise people will just keep their gasoline trucks running as long as they can.
If the true cost of “green energy” were to be widely known, there wouldn’t be a Democrat elected outside of Berkely for the next 50 years.
https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/your-life-under-the-green-new-deal
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BTW, GM is developing an electric light truck which would be a marginally acceptable replacement for pickup trucks as long as you don’t pull a trailer or carry a load more than 100 miles.
The base model starts at $112,000.
See how that goes over,
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More sophistry.
You took “a few years” very, very literally. To make a specious point. The observable fact of the matter is that electric vehicles are increasingly popular, affordable and useful and with Biden’s plan to establish a network of 50,000 recharging stations will become even more so. So, no, we will not be scrapping still useful vehicles. Biden used a big word – “transition.” Maybe you do no know what that means if you really think the threat of throwing away 18,000,000 vehicles is a valid argument.
Your poor ignored country-folk baloney is never persuasive and gets less so with each repetition. As for the GM pickup, have you so little faith in the marketplace? If they are building it, they think they can sell it. And, there will be others to compete with it.
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Of course they have a market for the electric Hummer.
Athletes ans celebrities will buy them to virtue signal.
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Oh ye of little faith [in the market]. Your $112,000 pickup is a little bit dated already. There are several in the works for half that or less.
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RE: “You can’t just count the jobs required to build and install wind and solar, you must also count the jobs lost elsewhere due to high energy costs and diversion of capital.”
Not to worry. Biden will raise the minimum wage so that workers can afford the higher prices.
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Careful. Paul will think you are serious about that as a solution.
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Like Henry Ford did?
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RE: “Like Henry Ford did?”
Nope. Ford had a turnover problem. Biden will cause unemployment. Different problem.
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Biden will have to work very, very hard to cause more unemployment than has Dear Leader. He will be leaving office on January 20, 2021 with fewer jobs than he started with. Last President to “achieve” that was probably Herbert Hoover.
I am not sure what you mean by a “turnover problem.” Ford made a long term decision to pay what were then fabulous wages because he understood that people without money could not buy things. Pretty simple really.
By the way, there is not a lot of real world evidence that higher minimum wages cause unemployment if that is what you are talking about. It’s impact is very small compared to other factors . . .
https://www.pigeonroost.net/minimum-wage-unemployment-confusing-micro-and-macro/
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RE: “I am not sure what you mean by a ‘turnover problem.'”
I’m not surprised. Here’s a link that explains:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-story-of-henry-fords-5-a-day-wages-its-not-what-you-think/#464e8afe766d
RE: “By the way, there is not a lot of real world evidence that higher minimum wages cause unemployment if that is what you are talking about.”
Don’t be ridiculous. There’s plenty of empirical data. For example:
https://www.aier.org/research/the-minimum-wage-bad-for-low-skilled-workers/
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“I’m not surprised”
“Turnover” is an ambiguous word with two entirely different meanings in this context. It was not clear from your comment which you were referring to.
“Turnover” refers to employee turnover as described in the article, but it also refers to revenue.
https://www.google.com/search?q=turnover+definition&oq=turnover&aqs=chrome.5.69i57j46i433j0i433l2j46j0i433l2j0.5762j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Here is a pro tip. When it comes to actual facts do not assume that you know more than other people if that assumption is the basis for snide brickbats. You will, as in this case, end up with egg on your face more often than not.
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Here is a pro tip for you: Never accuse someone of misusing a word when in fact they use it correctly.
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I did not accuse you of misusing the word. I said I did not know what you were referring to. Either of the meanings of “turnover” might have made sense in your post. It could have been work force turnover or it could have been sales. And since Ford famously sold his cars to his workers, sales would have been the first guess.
You are far too eager to take offense. What is up with that?
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“The news media should be ashamed….” What a fantastical thought. Shamelessness is the first requirement for working in our moribund media.
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“The news media should be ashamed….”
You first. And Don and Todd. And Bobr….
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Yeah! The mainstream media keeps reporting those pesky facts and everybody knows that reality has a – let’s see, how would someone with your intellect put it – a “commie” bias.
And, you know what else. Everywhere you go you find newspapers and reporters who will just not admit that Trump is the greatest President we ever had. Let’s see. He has done more for “the blacks” than Abraham Lincoln. More for the economy than FDR. More for the environment than TR. And more to make America admired in the world than JFK. But these shameless media people just refuse to report these wonderful “alternative facts.”
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So the oil industry warns of a “lasting depression” if we move away form fossil fuels to renewables? Wow, there is an unbiased thought. The depression will be to their industry and if their employees know that retraining for jobs in the renewables sector will keep them working at a similar, or even better, rate of pay, they will jump. At least they should.
Evolution is not just for beings lesser than humans.
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You cannot boost an economy by forcing uneconomic choices.
It can appear to work briefly but the invisible harm will always outweigh the more apparent boon.
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