Jesus Christ. These new green jobs suck.

It is undeniable that the contemplated carbon tax/”cap-and-trade” legislation will create jobs. But the question should not be whether it will create jobs, but rather what kinds of jobs? How many? And, at what cost?

Here is Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, describing how the legislation could be a jobs windfall for her home state:

Moving forward with the climate bill, Boxer said, would “allow this economy to take off, because it would draw, not federal funds, but private funds.”

She said that venture capitalists in her home state of California have told her that the bill would signal a good time to invest in green technologies, which Boxer said she hoped would create jobs.

If the government makes it inordinately expense or difficult, or both, to do business, it is likely that entrepeneurs and investors will divert resources to emergent industries that solve (or circumvent) those challenges. At least as long as we practice some semblance of capitalism, that’s what will happen. And it will clearly create some jobs. But something else will happen, too– dirty, boring industrial jobs that Barbara Boxer and Kleiner Perkins don’t have any interest in may evaporate or move to China or India forever.

I can’t help wondering what other legislation might create new, sexy, “green collar jobs,” whatever the hell that means:

• Grounded-for-Good. It is illegal to fly on an airplane unless you are a Congressperson, or one of the 25 amazing American patriots that each Congressperson is allowed to pick. Source of new jobs: solar-powered zeppelins, hang-gliding insurance, graft
• No-More-Guzzlers. The internal combustion engine is illegal. It is also illegal to talk disparagingly about the imminent Fisker Automotive IPO, or billionaires from Tennessee. Source of new jobs: Self-congratulatory Tesla and Fisker merchandise
• Alpacas-All-The-Time. It is discovered that the alpaca has a substantially smaller carbon footprint than cows, pigs and other livestock animals– which are all, naturally, now illegal. Source of new jobs: Alpaca psychics, one-way zeppelin flights out of the USA

That's super!

Al Gore must be tired of his proletariat hybrid cars.  He needs something fancier, something that proudly announces to the world:  I am an unstoppable douchebag!  Enter the “Karma”, $90,000 luxury green car for the truly discerning eco-elitist.

Fortunately for the Oscar-winning Nobel laureate, connections with the government will get you a big heap of taxpayer money to fund whatever industrial lark you can dream up.  This comes in the form of a $528.7 million dollar loan to Fisker Automotive, a luxury green carmaker funded in part by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, a firm at which Al Gore is a parter.  Isn’t government money handy when you want to make huge, risky equity investments?

From the Inconvenient Truth website:

Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced.

Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged:

Capitalists with government help…the worst of all economic phenomenon.