Open Thread: White House Admits There Are Few Actual ‘Green’ Jobs

April 6th, 2012 10:34 AM

Today's starter topic: It's not often that you see an Obama Administration official admit to making a mistake, which is why stimulus creator Jared Bernstein's remarks on so-called "green" jobs are worth preserving. According to Bernstein, the Administration didn't realize before the stimulus money was being allocated that operating solar or wind plants doesn't really employ a large number of people. In other words, the promised green jobs turned out not to really exist.

Full quote from Bernstein is below:

BERNSTEIN:  I was very active in the implementation of the Recovery Act, and one thing we found about clean energy was that you build a solar plant, you're gonna hire a lot of people.  You run a solar plant, it doesn't take a ton of people to run some of these plants.  Some of these firms don't employ as many people as you might hope.

Video below courtesy of the Rush Limbaugh Show:

On his program yesterday, Limbaugh interpreted Bernstein's remarks as meaning that the jobs haven't materialized due to the large number of bankruptcies of such politically well-connected "green" companies, however, it's actually worse than that.

Even if the companies don't go bankrupt, Bernstein has admitted that they don't employ that many people once operational. That's a pretty stunning admission. And one would think that if anyone at the White House had bothered to do some adequate research before doling out the billions, they would have realized that solar power plants have consistently employed small numbers of employees over their entire history. Why would President Obama have to spend billions of dollars to figure out such a basic concept?