A broken window fallacy would be more like “Let’s adopt this new green energy because it is currently less efficient on a cost basis and so will create new jobs”
Or saying “green energy won’t cost anything because it will create new jobs”. Some people may be saying that one, but I think most people spouting the jobs line are trying to build political goodwill on places currently dependent on carbon jobs.
However, the coal plant is not perfectly good -- it has a massive amount of externalities that outweigh its benefits.
Can you support this claim?
So which is better, Hydrocarbon Power or Poor People?
Forgive me for being facetious, but to make my position more clear: I think electrifying the country has had demonstrable benefits to our society. To claim the costs outweigh the benefits is dubious and requires support.
1) Coal pollution kills 10,000 people a year, most of them poor because no rich person would live close to a coal plant. So that's a massive cost weighing heavily on the benefits of coal electrification.
2) Wind & Solar power are cheaper than coal, and not just by a little bit. So much so that in some places the capital and operating costs of wind and solar are cheaper than just the operating costs of coal. In those places abandoning the coal capital is still a win.
3) Much of the capital costs of a coal plant are in it's steam plant and in its grid interconnects. That makes them superb places to turn other heat sources into electricity and great places to inject non-heat sourced green electricity into the grid. So we don't lose all the capital investment into our coal plants.
4) mitigation costs of a tonne of CO2 at $50-$300/tonne make it a no brainer. adaptation costs for climate change would be even higher.
Bill Gates argues your point very strongly in his book. Before he was a climate change activist he was an activist for the health and welfare of the global poor. He understands the importance of electricity to the global poor and firmly rejects any solution that stops the progress of getting it to them.
Particularly, what are the adaptation costs?
Mitigation costs are expenses to prevent climate change.
Adaptation costs are expenses incurred because of climate change. Some of them are relatively easy to calculate like $200B to build a sea wall for New York City. Some of them are more handwavy -- what are the costs of mass migration? Most of these costs are incurred by farmers.
"Job creation on this scale and at this pace is not without precedent. The U.S. followed avery similar path in mobilizing for WWII. Winning the war for the Allies had a total cost ofaround 1.5 1939 GDPs. Transitioning to a completely decarbonized energy system probablyhas a cost closer to just 1 2019 GDP of $22 Trillion.
Recognizing the terrifying realities on the front lines of battle, and the deprivations at home, is this a fair comparison?
"In the most simplistic analysis, only considering jobs in the energy industry, we cansee that decarbonization will produce at steady state a few millions more direct jobs thanwhat we are doing today with fossil fuels. In a more complete economic analysis based onthe typical methodologies for modeling economy-wide job creation we see the net creationof around 23 million jobs at the peak settling at around 4-6 million more jobs at steadystate (2040 and beyond)"
4 million net jobs represents an increased cost of $200 billion per year for the same level of service ($600/yr per US citizen). The article estimates the capital costs of decarbonization to be approximately $3 trillion ($9,000 per US citizen).
Very good. We have a baseline understanding of the real costs of the project. Now what is the cost of the null alternative? Could we realized a decarbonized society without government intervention? Is this the most efficient use of capital?
"More jobs" for the same production of goods/energy is less efficient and produces less total prosperity. You're better off using the most efficient means of production, and letting the other people produce something else of value.
Perhaps... The moneyed participants in the Renewable Energy industry are economic frontrunners - preparing for what they see is an inevitable future of expensive hydrocarbons. While the Green Jobs are less efficient today, they speculate they will become more efficient tomorrow, and make them all rich. But this is hardly a marketable proposition to the millions of taxpayers who are being asked to stabilize their less-efficient market offerings, and so baser arguments are made.
This argument that green energy creates new jobs... is this not a version of the broken-window fallacy?