Manzi Bait

Brian Beutler wonders if green jobs are a hoax:

...are liberals and environmentalists being honest when they say green jobs will offset the jobs lost when the fossil fuel industry is forced to downsize, and, if so, why are labor leaders so reluctant to support climate change policies? My own view on this is that it's an extremely narrow, hazy, and unanswerable question.

Nobody really knows what sorts of advancements investment in alternative energy projects will yield in the coming years, or how labor intensive the production of a kilowatt-hour will prove to be a decade or five from now. If a green energy revolution does in fact mean a net job loss in the energy sector, nobody really knows how many jobs will be created when people (who will eventually be saving on energy costs) have more money to toss around in other markets. And nobody really knows if the economic impact of that displacement will be worse than the economic impacts of climate change.