Most, gifted with the slightest grip on the basics of economics, pick up on the fact that producers of widgets (and the like) are driven by the prospect of profits (a motive lost on Labor/Green apparatchiks), which, in turn depend upon input costs.

For widget makers, butchers, bakers and the like, drive up input costs and, all things equal, their profits will fall; and their ability to invest in their business and employ people will drop off, too.

Where the item is high on the list of inputs, a jump in its cost may see that business, or even whole industries, collapse; as they end up insolvent.

As just the most glaring example, where the input is electricity, industries that use stacks of it – like manufacturers, miners and mineral processors – have been literally crushed, as power prices have skyrocketed; thanks to wind power subsidies and the additional and unnecessary costs of peaking power to back it up when it disappears every day:

Britain’s Economic Nightmare Unfolds: Wind Power Costs Killing Thousands of REAL Jobs

While Spaniards watched their government squandering hundreds of €billions on renewable subsidies, they headed for the dole queue – unemployment rocketed out of control. And, in a double whammy, the promised wind industry jobs ‘bonanza’ turned out to be little more than a cruel hoax.

Instead, of being its economic salvation, the insane cost of subsidising wind and solar power helped to kill off productive industries, with the general unemployment rate rocketing from 8% to 26% – youth unemployment nudged 50% in many regions (see our post here). For more detail on Spain’s renewables disaster see the study produced by the Institute for Energy Research available here.

In Spain, just as everywhere else, the great bulk of employment in the wind industry involves fleeting construction work (once the turbines are up, there’s nought to do) – of the jobs created:

“two-thirds of which came in construction, fabrication and installation, one quarter in administrative positions, marketing and projects engineering, and just one out of ten jobs has been created at the more permanent level of actual operation and maintenance”.

That the Spaniards had to stump up “subsidies of more than €1 million” to create each wind industry job; that each wind industry job thus created, killed off 2.2 jobs elsewhere in the economy; and that each MW of wind power capacity installed destroyed 4.27 jobs – is nothing short of an economic disaster (see our post here).

South Australia is Australia’s ‘wind power capital’ and has seen power prices and unemployment skyrocket. Under its current vapid leader, Jay Weatherill, SA’s Labor government has been talking up a completely wind powered future for months now; swanning off to Paris via Labor’s fantasy world, where the wind blows and the sun shines 24 x 365; and the power is, of course, totally “free” – with his claims that SA can ‘enjoy’ more than 50% of its power from the sun and the wind, with just a little (more) government “help”.

Back in ‘harsh reality land’, however, Jay’s presiding over the worst unemployment in the Nation, at 8% – and soon to rocket – worse still than perpetual basket case, Tasmania. Power hungry businesses, like mineral processor, Nyrstar are gripped with panic, as they face a further doubling of power prices and a grid on the brink of collapse (see our post here).

Throw massive and endless subsidies to producers of an unreliable and, therefore, inferior product (with the superior product already in abundant supply and available on-demand at 1/3 the cost); add the entire cost of those subsidies to the price of a key input; sit back; and watch your economy wilt.

Any job that relies on a subsidy results in a loss of employment elsewhere in the economy.

In Germany, the subsidies for “green” jobs are paid for in rocketing power prices, which impacts on the profitability and competitiveness of all businesses and industries. German manufacturers – and other energy intensive industries – faced with escalating power bills are set to pack up and head to the USA – where power prices are 1/3 of Germany’s (see our posts here and here and here).

In the result, Germany faces a decline in industrial output and, therefore, declining employment.

In the US, the same false promises have been pitched by wind worshippers for the same mercenary ends. However, in a monumental own goal, one study purporting to lay out America’s path to a 100% wind powered future, came to the obvious (but somewhat ‘inconvenient’ conclusion) that it’s a path to penury, with more than 1.2 million Americans facing permanent unemployment.

Enviros Accidentally Tout Study Showing 100% Green Energy Will Permanently Kill Millions Of Jobs
Daily Caller
Michael Bastasch
8 January 2016

Environmentalists are pushing a Stanford University study they claim proves the economy could run on 100 percent green energy, but they must not have realized the study also shows nearly 1.2 million Americans permanently out of work.

Stanford professor Mark Jacobson published a study last summerclaiming “each of the 50 United States to convert their all-purpose energy systems… to ones powered entirely by wind, water, and sunlight” by 2050. The study is touted by environmental groups and liberal news outlets featured Jacobson saying things like going 100 percent green “will create 22 million more jobs worldwide than the fossil economy.”

But Jacobson’s study doesn’t show net job increases anywhere close to what he claims, according to an investigation by Energy In Depth (EID) — an oil and gas industry-backed education project. EID dug into Jacobson’s data and found the professor’s study actually shows 3.8 million Americans put out of work. A greener America would only add 2.6 million long-term jobs — that’s a net loss of 1.2 million jobs.

“In transportation, more than 2.4 million men and women would be put out of work. Over 800,000 people working to produce oil and natural gas would lose their jobs,” according to EID’s Steve Everley. “Nearly 90,000 jobs connected to coal mining would be wiped out. All told, more than 3.8 million jobs would be lost, far more than the nearly 2.6 million long-term jobs that Jacobson has estimated would be created.”

“In a highlighted column entitled ‘Net Long Term Jobs,’ Jacobson’s table shows a negative 1,284,030,” Everley writes.

And the job losses won’t be spread evenly throughout the economy. Even states already aggressively mandating green energy will be hit.

California, for example, mandated 50 percent of its electricity come from green energy by 2030. Environmentalists cheered California’s decision, but Jacobson’s study predicts if California gets 100 percent of its energy from green sources it will lose more than 221,000 long-term jobs.

“Other states would also see huge losses,” Everley notes. “Texas, the country’s largest oil and natural gas producer, would shed more than a quarter million long-term jobs by transitioning to 100 percent renewables. In Wyoming, the largest coal producing state, the transition would destroy more than 32,000 jobs connected to the energy sector.”

Interestingly enough, green groups have ignored this inconvenient truth about a study claiming the U.S. will prosper using only green energy.

Anti-fracking filmmaker Josh Fox feature Jacobson’s work in his “Gasland” film series. Fox even went on a tour last year to tout green energy and said it “can benefit culture and democracy as well as being the next major economic development force.”

Environmentalists like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace also tout Jacobson’s study. The Sierra Club says using 100 percent green energy will have “positive environmental, social, and economic benefits,” like “new jobs and sources of revenue.”

Greenpeace says Jacobson’s plan is “the answer to alarming climate science” and will “eliminate most air pollution and global warming, create jobs, and provide energy stability and energy price stability.”
Daily Caller

The desire to condemn more than 1.2 million Americans to poverty is evidence enough to show that the wind industry and its mouthpiece, Greenpeace are a band of delusional human-haters – who regard people, in the words of Greenpeace founder, Patrick Moore “as the enemies of the Earth, a cancer on the planet”.

But, as this study shows, the facts never seem to run with the propaganda that they pedal.  Let these lunatics dictate energy policy, and we’ll all be on the dole queue – and that’s a fact.