The White House fired Van Jones after the press made a big deal out of the fact that the Green Jobs Czar said something something about communism, signed a Truther petition, and called conservatives assholes, but all those transgressions–and I’m not actually sure that the last one is as bad as everyone said it is–pale in comparison to his real sin: Bullshitting people who look to him for an honest answer about the economic viability of “greening the American economy.”
The answers he gave in a recent Center for American Progress interview are a perfect example. Let’s start with this one:
You say, “why is it important for ordinary voices to be heard?” Well, because frankly, if we had a clean energy economy, we would have more work, more wealth, and better health for regular people. That’s what’s not getting through. There are way more jobs putting up solar panels, building smart batteries, making wind turbines, putting them up, than we will ever have again in America in the coal lines. Period.
If you want a jobs agenda, we need to be moving toward a technology-based job agenda rather than continuing to pull down on our natural resources that we are now beginning to see dwindle here in America. You’ll have more wealth. There are way more entrepreneurial opportunities for new businesses and new products and new services in the clean energy space. Not many people are going to go out and start an oil company tomorrow. But people can go start a solar company tomorrow.
Can they really go start a solar company tomorrow? Sure, the price of solar panels has dropped since they first came into vogue, but not by much:
When Greg Hare looked into putting solar panels on his ranch-style home in Magnolia, Tex., last year, he decided he could not afford it. “I had no idea solar was so expensive,” he recalled.
But the cost of solar panels has plunged lately, changing the economics for many homeowners. Mr. Hare ended up paying $77,000 for a large solar setup that he figures might have cost him $100,000 a year ago.
The price drops — coupled with recently expanded federal incentives — could shrink the time it takes solar panels to pay for themselves to 16 years, from 22 years, in places with high electricity costs, according to Glenn Harris, chief executive of SunCentric, a solar consulting group. That calculation does not include state rebates, which can sometimes improve the economics considerably.
Even with rebates, not too many people can afford to drop $70k on solar panels. And why should they when the average annual utility bill for a single family home is all of $2,200? My beef then with Jones’ assertion that we can empower marginalized communities by roping them into the green energy business is that there isn’t a large enough market to employ all those people. Could we subsidize a market into existence? God yes, that’s why we still have ethanol! But we shouldn’t for many reasons but mostly because THERE IS NO MORE MONEY.
I’m also a little flabbergasted that Jones calls weatherization “Cash for Caulkers”:
I’m most excited about the proposal for HOME STAR, which is so-called Cash for Caulkers, which is about making people’s homes better. Right now people are paying 20, 30, 40 percent too much on their energy bills because we don’t have the right insulation, we don’t have the right windows, we don’t have the new boilers and furnace, but nobody’s got any money to go get all that stuff. And so HOME STAR would actually give some tax credits and some support for ordinary Americans to go and say, “I’m going to invest in my home. I’m going to save on energy.” But that’s also going to stimulate the economy and give somebody a job to come in here and install all that stuff.
What’s so important about energy efficiency—everybody talks about solar panels and that’s the kind of sexy stuff—but these hardworking energy efficiency dollars are the most fiscally conservative and possibly high-impact dollars we can spend in the short-term. So these are the kinds of proposals, I think, that it’s kind of like Earth Day 2.0 moment that we’re in where it’s going to be a different of environmentalism. Sleeves rolled up, hard hat, lunch bucket, that’s going to become the image of the environmentalist rather than just our beloved tree huggers.
Weatherization really does save money–but the government sucks at making it happen:
The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, which prior to the Obama administration had an annual weatherization budget of $13 million, committed to spending $327 million in stimulus funds to weatherize 56,000 homes by 2012.
The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs had only managed to weatherize 47 homes with its 50-fold budget as of the Sept. 30, 2009, stimulus reporting deadline. According to CNN, the stipulations surrounding stimulus spending are so complex that Texas “had to set up training academies to teach people how to manage the federal money,” which drastically slowed the weatherization process.
So, Texas can’t weatherize efficiently with a 50x-larger budget, and solar panels are still prohibitively expensive, and Van Jones calls subsidizing both a “fiscally conservative” energy policy? Ridiculous. Also, happy Earth Day!