Jobs are still a cost, jobs are still a cost
We are not mariners but would claim sufficient maturity in years to stoppeth one in three to insist that jobs are a cost, not a benefit, of doing something:
Joe Biden’s $2tn plan to eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions from the US electricity grid within 15 years has been applauded by climate campaigners, but the enormous overhaul will have to pick its way through a minefield of community as well as lobbyist opposition.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has touted millions of new jobs in a clean energy economy where electric vehicles, retrofitted buildings and renewable power generation help phase out emissions from fossil fuels.
It’s those millions of jobs that are to be created. These are costs of the plan, not benefits of it.
Yes, agreed, there are costs to the use of fossil fuels. Even for those not all that worried about plant food the other noxious emissions are indeed a cost. But their benefit is that we get the energy to power a civilisation through the use of less human labour. That’s exactly why we’ve a problem about either the noxious or the plant food parts. Because the use of that less human effort is a benefit to us as a society, even as it has its own costs, those emissions.
Do note that we’re not, here at least, arguing about whether we all should or shouldn’t move to renewables or not. We just want to insist that we balance the credits and debits the correct way around as we consider the decision.
Needing more human sweat and grunt work is a cost to a plan, not a benefit of it. Thus claims that millions of jobs will be created by this or that path are righteously costs of that idea, not benefits of it.
It’s worth noting that the more important we - or you - think climate change is then the more vital it becomes to consider the matter clearly. The more the insistence is that this is a civilisation threatening event the more we do have to make sure that we’ve our costs and benefits the right way around. To do otherwise would to be of sense forlorn, would it not?