Green jobs update and theory-of-value arguments

My favorite jobs board, Clean Techies.com, is still posting lots of those Saudi Aramco jobs, but the new development in the last few weeks is a boom in hiring for energy analysts and auditors in California.

It isn't hard to figure out why.

Four characters:

AB32

The landmark California climate change mitigation law has passed its various court tests and survived until the big Implementation Day. This has been a six-year wait, and there have been a lot of strange bets placed and weird hedges made in the meantime, including a ballot provision challenge, but it's finally down to the wire and time to hire.

Of course, the free-marketeers will cry out that these jobs being spurred by climate change legislation aren't "real jobs." In doing so, of course, they are using the theory-of-value argument that there's no real value of economic production created by environmental regulation, that all that we're creating is a complicated market of arbitrage centered around an actual fact of industrial decline due to environmental over-regulation.

I think that's utter claptrap and nonsense, of course.

The real value that is created is inherent, first and foremost, in abated future climate change (assuming other states and world regions follow suit -- see my recent post for Revkin's NYT blog about how this might be made to happen economically and diplomatically), second, in non-climate related pollution reduction improvements (such as reduction of lost work and school days due to asthma, for instance, but there are many others), and third, but not least, large future reduction in dollars needed to patrol the middle east militarily since the Carter Doctrine was first promulgated.

Besides, you can't have it both ways. If reducing emissions is zero-sum game or net-loss arbitrage in terms of a theory of value, what is stock market speculation?

I'm fond of my own personal theory of value argument, which says that we should get back to a more physical theory of value, and move away from marketing spin and claptrap.

Actually, to be more forceful here, I don't think we can abate or mitigate climate change unless we get back to a more physical theory of value. If all we do is spin, we'll keep adding to atmospheric carbon. Then all we'll be left with is adaptation, and adaptation in the force of grave geopolitical danger to boot.

Which at heart will be a forced superstorm of global revaluation, won't it? Never mind the most extreme test of societal leadership in human history.

The root theory of value question is, well, "what is it, actually, that we hold most dear?"

If you're a farmer who feeds his family and maintains and heats his own home, this is not that hard of a question to answer. First and foremost, I value the food on my plate that I grow myself, the house and barn that I maintain myself, the logs in my woodpile, and the physical capital of cost-effective, energy-efficient, labor-saving machines, that I own and maintain myself, that help me produce these valuable physical goods with less labor than would otherwise be required.

Now, extrapolate to the greater society.

Reuters article on climate in Europe (and the "world's oldest tree")

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/19/us-climate-plants-idUSBRE89I0PP20121019

NYT editorial on geoengineering

From Naomi Klein

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/opinion/sunday/geoengineering-testing-the-waters.html

Major NYT feature on the energy prospect (for class)

A half-million jobs as a result of cheap gas? Seems at least plausible. Low cost industrial energy may bring some manufacturing back from the far east, where gas is much more expensive.

But read, and consider, carefully, before you decide.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/business/energy-environment/us-energy-policy-caught-in-the-vise-of-economics-and-politics.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1351076579-QDgm6e5rZ8RZ5dvXZIRG9A

Reinhart-Rogoff abused by Romneyites

My former economics professor at the policy school, Carmen Reinhart, is upset that the Romney campaign has misused and abused economic theory on recessions, the correct view of which she feels is given in her recent book (co-written with Ken Rogoff) This Time is Different.

The title is meant to be ironic (about how recessions follow predictable pathways but policy makers always think "this time is different"), but the Romney campaign team may have missed this, and are stressing difference.

Perhaps they don't do irony.

Krugman blogged about it this morning. Carmen and Ken attempted to set the record straight via the Bloomberg editorial page last week.

This is a nice Teachable Moment on recoveries, and leads into our new topic of inflation calculation, so we'll study this today in Ec & Quant.

Why they were hiring

A couple months ago I noticed, on the green tech jobs boards, a lot of Saudi Aramco hiring of green tech types.

This is why, recently revealed.

They must not have wanted to bid the market up. (But of course, they just did.)

Don't expect to find "high wage, medium skill jobs"

There were other ideas to be extracted from this NYT editorial by Tom Friedman, but that was the one I liked, since it will help me with my perennial project of driving home to students how competitive the US job market is now and has been for several years.

You choose. Do you want to properly learn your college skills ("read, write, think, figure"), to the appropriate competitive level?

Or do you prefer a low wage, low skill job?

High wage: high skill?

Medium wage: medium skill?

Low wage: low skill?

The choice starts now, today, not tomorrow.

Competition for "high wage, high skill," and even for "medium wage, medium skill" started the first day of your first college class, and even back in high school.

Have you been competing? Are you taking advantage of every opportunity college offers to develop theses skills? Or are you just kind of drifting along, not really caring about what happens next?

If you don't like Mr. Friedman's message, don't complain to me. Or him. That's "shooting the messenger", something you would realize is fruitless, had you used the opportunities college offered you to learn to think critically.

I'm not in charge of the job market. I didn't make it this way.

Deal with it now. Or deal with it later. But you will have to deal with it.