The other issue is that none of the equipment is made in the UK and hence we are subsidising imports. Solar panels are almost exclusively made in China and wind turbines in Denmark, Germany, China and Spain.
Given that the corrupt Welsh government is enabling dodgy developers to desecrate and destroy rural Wales with plans for 220m tall industrial wind turbines, plus vast solar arrays battery banks along with miles upon miles of new pylons the depth and breadth of Wales in order to export any energy produced to England, I looked into the source of pylons these days. Unsurprisingly it was China where the UK and U.S. along with other countries have offshored their manufacturing, ostensibly in order to meet their politically contrived low "carbon" targets.
If the UK had taken a different path, as Canada (mainly the province of Ontario) did in the 1970's with their indigenous designed CANDU nuclear reactors, they would be 5X lower emissions and 96% of the green jobs would be created in the UK, instead of China. And this with a population of 1/4 that of the UK.
and all the High Voltage transformers, switchgear, HVDC equipment most of the HV cables oh and all the offshore vessels that do the installation are largely from Holland or Middle East. Yet this daft government call us world leaders in offshore wind!!!
There’s nothing wrong per se with importing things. No doubt the kit manufactured overseas is cheaper than the U.K. kit which means that the subsidy required is lower.
Of course, we shouldn’t subsidise uneconomic activity even to the tune of one penny; but if it is done then the cheapest alternative is preferable.
BOTH parties are totally unfit to govern and present a clear and present existential danger to the economy and to the social fabric of the nation. They both want to deindustrialise the economy and industrialise the natural landscape in their mad, malign pursuit of an unachievable and utterly pointless 'Green' utopia which assures that only that a nightmarish Green dystopia will be delivered to order as a direct result of the attempt to get to imaginary 'Net Zero'.
Is it really too much to expect the majority of voters to be aware of this, as well as being aware of the many other nation-destroying policies which Labour and the Cons stubbornly cling to and intend to implement to the detriment of us all? It's not staring us all in the face now, it's slapping us hard around the chops, daily and repeatedly. If you want to save your country the choice is obvious: do NOT vote for ANY of the major parties, which are all 100% captured by outside interests, but DO vote - for independents, for Reform even, for any other minor globalist opposition candidates who might be standing OR, most importantly, SPOIL your ballot paper by writing 'None of the above' or 'I do not consent'. Spoiled ballots ARE counted.
If the MAJORITY use their vote to give the Uniparty a well deserved kick in the goolies, it will be the first step in a much needed political and cultural revolution in this country. If the majority vote Labour in order to kick the Cons in the goolies, traitorous politicians from both parties will be laughing their socks off as they quickly finish the job which they started in earnest in 1992, of destroying our once great nation. GB will NOT recover from 5 years of Starmer, Milliband, Reeves et al.
Unfortunately, the polls suggest the brain dead electorate WILL vote Labour in a landslide. When that happens, I'll be giving up the ghost and concentrating solely on self-preservation as the ensuing Chaos engulfs the country. Very depressing.
Labour will use the huge majority they are gifted from a brain dead electorate to implement full scale Green Communism in the UK, aka Agenda 2030, and will ruthlessly silence any opposition to that agenda by using their unassailable majority to introduce draconian censorship legislation which will make the Tories' efforts look like child's play. By annihilating real jobs in real industries, and by promising 'Green' jobs which never materialise, they will make millions more dependent upon government handouts and therefore more controllable.
So depressing. If enough people in each constituency vote for the same non-Uniparty candidate, e.g Reform, they can succede as the separatist SNP have done in Scotland since 2007 by splitting the Unionist Uniparty vote.
If we had a choice to vote for None rather than having to spoil a ballot and this None had to be displayed on the Jumbotrons it would display a proper political control group.
It’s probably wishful thinking that anything will be done but we can but try
Spoiled ballots are counted, but are ignored since any deviation from the acceptable method of marking will spoil the ballot. There used to be an option of "declining the ballot", which was understand as being a specific rejection of all candidates on the ballot. Unfortunately this option was removed in my country many years ago.
This is how we use our numbers peacefully. If the majority of ballots are spoiled, and spoiled in a specific way, then the powers that be will find it difficult to ignore them and the ballots that have been filled in correctly will represent a small minority of the electorate. Sadly though, so many are brainwashed into the notion that they must vote for a candidate - because 'democracy'.
if there is any possibility that a majority of ballots can be spoiled, then it would be possible for that majority to nominate and elect an independent representative from amongst themselves. The real problem is that usually, not always, the voters will only elect the candidates chosen by mainstream political parties. In 2022 when I was canvassing for a minor party candidate, I was told by one voter that he wasn't going to vote at all because he didn't like the major party candidates. Voting, especially in local elections, has been declining for generations and that doesn't upset the "powers that be". And with electronic voting, spoiled ballots don't even exist.
David - The sad thing is that it has been known for well over a decade that the "green jobs" vision is nonsense. I wrote about it back in 2011, summarising a whole lot of data and academic evidence. Nothing significant has changed since then and it is good to see your take on the matter. But, there are none so blind as will not see.
If you step away from the particular claims about green jobs, one encounters all kinds of variants from the arts and culture to sport and infant industries. Many of them are underpinned by incompetent and (occasionally) dishonest economists who are happy to act as shills for their clients.
A bigger issue, especially among politicians, is the complete failure to understand that things have to add up. You can fund all kinds of investment in renewable energy or whatever and that money will create visible employment. However, the claims ignore the fact that the money has to come from somewhere - either current taxes or future taxes via borrowing. Diverting money reduces expenditures and employment in the rest of the economy and that may have very high costs but ones that are less visible.
In your calculations it is simple to show that we would all be better off by paying £50,000 per job to do nothing and forgetting the rest. A classic version of digging holes and filling them in again. Of course, even better to do nothing, but I think that it is best just to describe Milliband's delusions as an exercise in hole-digging.
I spoke to the contractors building a solar farm near me. Everyone I spoke to was foreign. Are green jobs on the shortage skills list? On that site, the green jobs were for migrant workers.
I'm old enough to remember the early days of nuclear when they said it would make electricity so cheap it wouldn't be worth metering! Of course that didn't take into account all the other costs and decommissioning. At least nuclear doesn't need back up generation!
Who said that? That was some bureaucrat talking to Sci-fi writers about future fusion power. Engineering analysis at the time showed nuclear would be cost competitive with coal & cheaper than gas. In fact it proved to be cheaper than gas & coal, which is why the building boom in nuclear began. One NPP completed per month by 1974. Until our corrupt public/private partnership ruling class put the kibosh on it.
The jobs are either replacing existing jobs, in which case no net jobs are being created. Or they are additional jobs, in which case more jobs are required for the same benefit, the jobs are less efficient and by implication more expensive than the replaced jobs.
The green jobs are a version of the broken window fallacy. The strength of an economy, the standard of living of the population, are determined by worker productivity not having lots of workers achieving very little. The green jobs charade would be like the UK gov't ordering all heavy equipment be shutdown and replaced with people digging with shovels and breaking things up with hammers. Would likely collapse the economy.
Thank you for your research and illumination. I seem to remember a similar analysis years ago of jobs in the defence sector.
If we can briefly set aside for the sake of discussion, the crucial issue of what taxpayers money is spent on, and accept that subsidies may be useful in nudging behaviour or getting something going, it still leaves the monster of permanence. To quote Milton Friedman, "Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program".
Measured by government expenditure as a proportion of national income, we've had rather a lot of government for some time, with no prospect of anything other than an increase, and to my eyes, the results don't provide a glowing endorsement. Yet from time to time I read "the government must do more" - like asking a builder who's just trashed your house to come back and build an extension.
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2024/02/23/how-many-green-jobs-can-we-afford/
The other issue is that none of the equipment is made in the UK and hence we are subsidising imports. Solar panels are almost exclusively made in China and wind turbines in Denmark, Germany, China and Spain.
Yes. That's where the "green jobs" are being created.
Given that the corrupt Welsh government is enabling dodgy developers to desecrate and destroy rural Wales with plans for 220m tall industrial wind turbines, plus vast solar arrays battery banks along with miles upon miles of new pylons the depth and breadth of Wales in order to export any energy produced to England, I looked into the source of pylons these days. Unsurprisingly it was China where the UK and U.S. along with other countries have offshored their manufacturing, ostensibly in order to meet their politically contrived low "carbon" targets.
If the UK had taken a different path, as Canada (mainly the province of Ontario) did in the 1970's with their indigenous designed CANDU nuclear reactors, they would be 5X lower emissions and 96% of the green jobs would be created in the UK, instead of China. And this with a population of 1/4 that of the UK.
and all the High Voltage transformers, switchgear, HVDC equipment most of the HV cables oh and all the offshore vessels that do the installation are largely from Holland or Middle East. Yet this daft government call us world leaders in offshore wind!!!
There’s nothing wrong per se with importing things. No doubt the kit manufactured overseas is cheaper than the U.K. kit which means that the subsidy required is lower.
Of course, we shouldn’t subsidise uneconomic activity even to the tune of one penny; but if it is done then the cheapest alternative is preferable.
BOTH parties are totally unfit to govern and present a clear and present existential danger to the economy and to the social fabric of the nation. They both want to deindustrialise the economy and industrialise the natural landscape in their mad, malign pursuit of an unachievable and utterly pointless 'Green' utopia which assures that only that a nightmarish Green dystopia will be delivered to order as a direct result of the attempt to get to imaginary 'Net Zero'.
Is it really too much to expect the majority of voters to be aware of this, as well as being aware of the many other nation-destroying policies which Labour and the Cons stubbornly cling to and intend to implement to the detriment of us all? It's not staring us all in the face now, it's slapping us hard around the chops, daily and repeatedly. If you want to save your country the choice is obvious: do NOT vote for ANY of the major parties, which are all 100% captured by outside interests, but DO vote - for independents, for Reform even, for any other minor globalist opposition candidates who might be standing OR, most importantly, SPOIL your ballot paper by writing 'None of the above' or 'I do not consent'. Spoiled ballots ARE counted.
If the MAJORITY use their vote to give the Uniparty a well deserved kick in the goolies, it will be the first step in a much needed political and cultural revolution in this country. If the majority vote Labour in order to kick the Cons in the goolies, traitorous politicians from both parties will be laughing their socks off as they quickly finish the job which they started in earnest in 1992, of destroying our once great nation. GB will NOT recover from 5 years of Starmer, Milliband, Reeves et al.
Unfortunately, the polls suggest the brain dead electorate WILL vote Labour in a landslide. When that happens, I'll be giving up the ghost and concentrating solely on self-preservation as the ensuing Chaos engulfs the country. Very depressing.
You see what I mean?
Labour will use the huge majority they are gifted from a brain dead electorate to implement full scale Green Communism in the UK, aka Agenda 2030, and will ruthlessly silence any opposition to that agenda by using their unassailable majority to introduce draconian censorship legislation which will make the Tories' efforts look like child's play. By annihilating real jobs in real industries, and by promising 'Green' jobs which never materialise, they will make millions more dependent upon government handouts and therefore more controllable.
https://www.gbnews.com/politics/labour-win-seats-tories-crash-election-catastrophe
So depressing. If enough people in each constituency vote for the same non-Uniparty candidate, e.g Reform, they can succede as the separatist SNP have done in Scotland since 2007 by splitting the Unionist Uniparty vote.
This why I think we need enough signatures on this petition
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/650023
If we had a choice to vote for None rather than having to spoil a ballot and this None had to be displayed on the Jumbotrons it would display a proper political control group.
It’s probably wishful thinking that anything will be done but we can but try
Spoiled ballots are counted, but are ignored since any deviation from the acceptable method of marking will spoil the ballot. There used to be an option of "declining the ballot", which was understand as being a specific rejection of all candidates on the ballot. Unfortunately this option was removed in my country many years ago.
This is how we use our numbers peacefully. If the majority of ballots are spoiled, and spoiled in a specific way, then the powers that be will find it difficult to ignore them and the ballots that have been filled in correctly will represent a small minority of the electorate. Sadly though, so many are brainwashed into the notion that they must vote for a candidate - because 'democracy'.
if there is any possibility that a majority of ballots can be spoiled, then it would be possible for that majority to nominate and elect an independent representative from amongst themselves. The real problem is that usually, not always, the voters will only elect the candidates chosen by mainstream political parties. In 2022 when I was canvassing for a minor party candidate, I was told by one voter that he wasn't going to vote at all because he didn't like the major party candidates. Voting, especially in local elections, has been declining for generations and that doesn't upset the "powers that be". And with electronic voting, spoiled ballots don't even exist.
David - The sad thing is that it has been known for well over a decade that the "green jobs" vision is nonsense. I wrote about it back in 2011, summarising a whole lot of data and academic evidence. Nothing significant has changed since then and it is good to see your take on the matter. But, there are none so blind as will not see.
If you step away from the particular claims about green jobs, one encounters all kinds of variants from the arts and culture to sport and infant industries. Many of them are underpinned by incompetent and (occasionally) dishonest economists who are happy to act as shills for their clients.
A bigger issue, especially among politicians, is the complete failure to understand that things have to add up. You can fund all kinds of investment in renewable energy or whatever and that money will create visible employment. However, the claims ignore the fact that the money has to come from somewhere - either current taxes or future taxes via borrowing. Diverting money reduces expenditures and employment in the rest of the economy and that may have very high costs but ones that are less visible.
In your calculations it is simple to show that we would all be better off by paying £50,000 per job to do nothing and forgetting the rest. A classic version of digging holes and filling them in again. Of course, even better to do nothing, but I think that it is best just to describe Milliband's delusions as an exercise in hole-digging.
Digging holes and only half-filling them in again, because we don't even get reliable energy for our efforts.
That's exactly what it is. A version of the broken window fallacy.
I spoke to the contractors building a solar farm near me. Everyone I spoke to was foreign. Are green jobs on the shortage skills list? On that site, the green jobs were for migrant workers.
Great bit of research, thanks.
The figure is even more absurd than I would have guessed.
And me!
I'm old enough to remember the early days of nuclear when they said it would make electricity so cheap it wouldn't be worth metering! Of course that didn't take into account all the other costs and decommissioning. At least nuclear doesn't need back up generation!
Nor "constraint" payments which wind operators have been gaming.
Who said that? That was some bureaucrat talking to Sci-fi writers about future fusion power. Engineering analysis at the time showed nuclear would be cost competitive with coal & cheaper than gas. In fact it proved to be cheaper than gas & coal, which is why the building boom in nuclear began. One NPP completed per month by 1974. Until our corrupt public/private partnership ruling class put the kibosh on it.
The lunatic Biden's Green New Deal is so looney that even he renamed it, falsely and ludicrously, as the Inflation Reduction Act.
The whole "job creation" concept is nonsense.
The jobs are either replacing existing jobs, in which case no net jobs are being created. Or they are additional jobs, in which case more jobs are required for the same benefit, the jobs are less efficient and by implication more expensive than the replaced jobs.
The green jobs are a version of the broken window fallacy. The strength of an economy, the standard of living of the population, are determined by worker productivity not having lots of workers achieving very little. The green jobs charade would be like the UK gov't ordering all heavy equipment be shutdown and replaced with people digging with shovels and breaking things up with hammers. Would likely collapse the economy.
A restatement of Frederic Bastiat's theory of broken window economics, neither more nor less.
I’m sure these jobs are union jobs which make them politically necessary. Good luck eliminating the subsidies.
Extrapolating those figures, each employee of the NHS costs us a £100,000 each. I know which I prefer, and therein the importance of capitalism.
Thank you for your research and illumination. I seem to remember a similar analysis years ago of jobs in the defence sector.
If we can briefly set aside for the sake of discussion, the crucial issue of what taxpayers money is spent on, and accept that subsidies may be useful in nudging behaviour or getting something going, it still leaves the monster of permanence. To quote Milton Friedman, "Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program".
Measured by government expenditure as a proportion of national income, we've had rather a lot of government for some time, with no prospect of anything other than an increase, and to my eyes, the results don't provide a glowing endorsement. Yet from time to time I read "the government must do more" - like asking a builder who's just trashed your house to come back and build an extension.