Hot Air "Two? Well, it’s a start, anyway. If you missed John Kerry’s remarks on the job-destruction impact from Joe Biden’s executive orders on climate change, let’s refresh memories first. Reporters asked Kerry how the new administration would explain to hundreds of thousands of energy workers about the necessity of making them unemployed, Kerry suggested that they could “make better choices,” and told reporters that they should learn to build solar panels instead.
Kerry also made some claims about the dynamism of employment in the wind and solar energy fields, claims that got the attention of Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler:" ...
. . . "— John F. Kerry, special presidential envoy for climate, in remarks at the White House, Jan. 27, 2021
“Before covid, the fastest-growing job in the United States of America was solar panel technician, and the second-fastest-growing job was wind turbine technician.”
— Kerry, remarks on MSNBC, Jan. 28
"This metric is so elastic that it might as well be meaningless anyway. What does “fastest growing” mean, anyway? If a category goes from 500 to 2000 jobs, for example, that’s a 400% increase. If six million people get their jobs cut in another category, however, hearing about that 400% increase in another job category won’t do much to cheer them up.
"Those hypothetical numbers are a reductio ad absurdum, but as Kessler discovered, the reality of Kerry’s claims match up pretty well to the hypothetical. Coal mining, for instance, employs 50,000 people, Kessler discovered. Will the wind and solar energy sectors grow enough to employ those workers? Those categories won’t grow enough to employ even a quarter of them, not even after ten years at the rates Kerry was hailing in his remarks:
Wind turbine jobs are projected to go up by 4,300, from 7,000 to 11,300 in 10 years. The solar installer jobs are projected to go up 6,100, from 12,000 to 18,100. That’s a total increase of just 10,400 jobs — leaving 40,000 coal workers still toiling in the mines.
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