A charismatic Barack Obama peddled the idea of 5 million new green jobs as he ran for the presidency in 2008. Actually, the number was Hillary Clinton’s idea, but when she lost, Obama appropriated it. I wrote an article in 2010 in the Washington Post busting Obama’s myth, and the green industry rewarded me by keeping me unemployed ever since.
Obama invested billions in the clean energy sector. Flameout after flameout like the solar company, Solyndra, resulted. There was hardly any accrual in new green jobs.
That was the myth of the clean-energy industry — that the technology and business models were ready for 5 millions jobs. They weren’t. I was engineer in one corner of clean energy — smart utility meters.
While politicians sold their myth, the shale oil and gas industry created half a million jobs during the first half of the Obama presidency, all without federal funding or incentives. The economy was still rocky in 2012, and these shale jobs directly contributed in Obama winning his second term.
Again, we have a magnetic upstart, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. All of D.C. (save for Nancy Pelosi) seems in awe of her. Ocasio-Cortez has just unveiled a new green pipe dream. She doesn’t talk much about green jobs, tainted as the term has become. Instead she outlines her plans to make the US a net-zero emitter in 10 years.
She believes that renewable energy is the answer to her prayers. Solar and wind are the two pillars of renewable energy. But they are intermittent providers of power, and so need to be stored. No energy storage solution is on the horizon. Until one emerges, solar and wind will never prove viable.
Reaching net-zero status means that the US will also have to remove or store emissions. Once again, technology to remove and store emissions, otherwise known as carbon capture and storage, is not ready to do what Ocasio-Cortez wants from it over the next decade.
Electric vehicles have become all the rage. But these just transfer emissions from the tailpipe to the smokestack, in the sense that a power plant burning fossil fuels is still needed to generate the electricity needed to power these cars.
Elected officials such as Obama and Ocasio-Cortez have no significant experience working in industry, green or otherwise. They come to D.C. aiming to make a splash to further their political ambitions. Obama used green jobs, in part, to win the presidency. Ocasio-Cortez seems to have her eyes set upon similar goals.
This is not to say that cutting emissions is not a noble goal. But how far, how fast we go must depend upon grounded realities, and not on some charismatic politician’s attempts to capture the limelight.
Sunil Sharan is a former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.