FedUpUSA

Archive for the ‘Energy’ Category

Those of you counting on getting your old assembly line job back in Detroit can forget it.

The recent eight year forecast published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 4.19 million jobs will be gained in the US in professional and business services, followed by 4 million health care and social assistance jobs, while 1.2 million will be lost in manufacturing. This is great news for website designers, Internet entrepreneurs,  registered nurses, and masseuses in California, but grim tidings for traditional metal bashers in the rust belt manufacturing states like Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio.

I’m so old now that I am no longer asked for a driver’s license to get into a night club. Instead, they ask for a carbon dating. The real challenge for we aged career advisors is that probably half of these new service jobs haven’t even been invented yet, and if they can be described, it is only in a cheesy science fiction paperback with a half dressed blond on the front cover. After all, who heard of a webmaster, a cell phone contract sales person, or a blogger 40 years ago? Where are all these jobs going to? You guessed it, China, and other lower waged, upstream manufacturing countries like Vietnam, where the Middle Kingdom is increasingly subcontracting its own offshoring.

These forecasts may be optimistic, because they assume that Americans can continue to claw their way up the value chain in the global economy, and not get stuck along the way, as the Japanese did in the nineties. The US desperately needs no less than 27 million new jobs to soak up natural population and immigration growth and get us back to a traditional 5% unemployment rate. The only way that is going to happen is for America to invent something new and big, and fast. Personal computers achieved this during the eighties, and the Internet did the trick in the nineties. The fact that we’ve done diddly squat since 2000 but create a giant paper chase explains why job growth since then has been zero, real wage growth has been negative, and American standards of living are falling.

Alternative energy and biotechnology are two possible drivers for a new economy. Unfortunately, the last administration did everything it could to stymie progress in both these fields, coddling big oil so China could steal a lead in several alternative technologies, and starving stem cell researchers of Federal cash, ceding the lead there to others. While the current crop of politicians extol the virtues of education, the reality is that we are dumbing down our public education system. How do we invent the next “new” thing, while shrinking the University of California’s budget by 20% two years in a row? If my local high school can’t afford new computers, how is it going to feed Silicon Valley with computer literate work force? The US has a “Michael Jackson” economy. It’s still living like a rock star, but hasn’t had a hit in 20 years.

China can have all the $20 a day jobs it wants. But if it accelerates its move up the value chain, as it clearly aspires to do, then America is in for even harder times. I’ll be hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. How do you say “unemployment check” in Mandarin?

Paul Krugman argues that cap and trade worked to reduce sulfur dioxide and stop acid rain, and so it will work to reduce C02.

However, two EPA lawyers with more than 40 years of cumulative
experience – including the guy who has been head of California’s cap
and trade offset programs for more than 20 years – say that sulfur
dioxide was different, and that cap and trade for climate is a scam which only
benefits the financial players.

Specifically, they point out that:

• Cap and trade was tried in Europe, but ended up raising energy
  prices, creating volatility, produced few greenhouse gas reductions,
  but made billions for the financial players

• Even the guy who invented the cap and trade concept doesn’t think it will work in regards to climate change (see this and this)

• Carbon offsets – which are part of the cap and trade plan – increase pollution

• One reason that offsets lead to more pollution is that investors
  fight to keep toxic chemicals legal, so they can make more money off of
  trading the offsets

• Like subprime mortgages and other creative financial instruments
  which brought us the economic crisis, carbon offsets lack integrity and
  don’t work (see this)

Watch the video: