We don’t pay workers to dig holes and fill them in for no reason. Government could do this to create jobs, but it would produce nothing of value at a cost to society.
We don’t pay workers to dig holes and fill them in for no reason. Government could do this to create jobs, but it would produce nothing of value at a cost to society.
Yet we talk about jobs provided by competing sources of energy without much concern for the return on investment.
President Donald Trump and other advocates do this when defending the coal industry. They point to coal miners as justification for ending the war on coal. The coal mine, they tell us, supports households that patronize businesses. The little league coach works at the coal mine. The job is reason enough to continue with coal. It is a weak argument, at the expense of sounder economic logic.
Environmentalists counter pro-mining arguments by citing the high and growing employment associated with solar. They quote January’s 2017 U.S. Energy and Employment Report, which generated a media frenzy about the economic benefits of solar employment.
Solar employed more Americans in 2016 than coal, gas and oil combined. It comprised 43 percent of the electric sector’s workforce.
If jobs were a good measure of an industry’s worth, we would build roads with human shovel brigades instead of heavy equipment. Construction would cost more, with less efficient output, but would create more jobs.
We can’t afford to do this because society’s wealth is not enhanced by needless amounts of work. Standards of living improve only when output becomes greater and more efficient, as we find ways to produce more with less effort and expense. That is why we build roads with machines that out-produce hundreds of manually operated shovels. We need the most road miles for the least expense.
In assessing energy, we should focus less on jobs and more on helping end users afford to power offices, homes and cars. We should not fight for coal mining unless the jobs benefit consumers. We should not applaud solar employment as if the jobs are a means to an end.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports all those solar workers — who outnumber their peers in oil, gas and coal — produce 1 percent of the country’s electric needs. One coal miner produces as much energy as 79 workers in the solar industry. Two natural gas workers produce as much as 79 solar employees. One can argue the veracity of the data, but it is clear the industry needs to increase per-worker output.
“There’s only one reason that the solar workforce has been increasing so rapidly (25 percent gain last year) despite its dismal record of worker productivity and minuscule share of U.S. electric power — government policies that have subsidized the solar industry nearly 350 times more than fossil fuels per unit of electricity production,” wrote Mark J. Perry, in an article for the Washington Examiner.
Society needs a surplus of affordable power, from diversified sources, produced and consumed as efficiently as possible with vigilant efforts to protect the environment.
If solar can compete, without massive and eternal subsidization, society will benefit. Solar will become more competitive as it minimizes the number of employees needed to produce a unit of power.
We should not defend any energy source as a means of creating expensive, low-yielding jobs. It is not fair to people who can barely pay utility bills, and it is no means of growing our economy. We should favor energy products that give us the most for the least.
— The Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.)