As time passes, the skepticism grows about the ability of government funding for “green jobs” to simultaneously (a) pull the economy out of recession and (b) reduce the risk of climate change. In the March 4 edition of Slate–hardly a bastion of reactionary conservatism–Senior Fellow Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations took the greenwash off of “green jobs” in the essay, “Barking Up the Wrong Tree: Why green jobs may not save the economy or the environment.” Levi also directs CFR’s Program on Energy Security and Climate Change.…
It’s understandable that this happens during a recession, but nonetheless a very bad trend in policy analysis is the narrowminded focus on jobs per se. Thus the ~$800 billion spending package is evaluated according to how many jobs it will create or save, rather than according to its promotion of efficient resource allocation.
This focus on employment for its own sake is most evident in the “green jobs” rhetoric. There are two major problems with the typical claims in this area.…
Richard Larrick and Jack Soll have started a nifty website to promote their message that the conventional “miles per gallon (mpg)” metric is actually misleading and counterproductive for climate change and energy policy objectives. In their words:
MPG tricks people’s perceptions. Replacing a car that gets 14 MPG with a car that gets 17 MPG saves as much gas for a given distance as replacing a car that gets 33 MPG with a car that gets 50 MPG (about 100 gallons per 10,000 miles). MPG obscures the value of removing the most inefficient cars. A 14 to 20 MPG improvement saves twice as much gas as a 33 to 50 MPG improvement.
What to do instead? Rather than measuring distance per volume of fuel, Larrick and Soll recommend measuring volume of fuel per unit of length:…