Friedman's Green Tea Party

They say things haven’t changed much in the past 20 years in the Northwest Corner. And for the most part, that’s true. Most of our streets are still tree-lined, there aren’t any interstate highways in sight and you have to drive at least an hour to get to a shopping mall.

Call me strange, but perhaps the most significant shift I’ve noticed is a change in the types of automobiles that roll “down our country lanes†— to borrow a phrase from Sharon blogger Rick Hotaling.

Given the fact that both Region One School District enrollments and families with children are on the decline, even as the number of weekenders and wealthy retirees rises, you’d think the trend would be away from pickup trucks and minivans and toward BMWs and Audis. And for the last 15 years, that was surely true.

But since roughly 2005, I’ve noticed many of the Saabs and Volvos have been replaced by hybrids — especially the smaller varieties such as the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight.

I’ve even observed several Smart cars — those tiny and colorful electric cars that resemble fleet-footed insects. One woman in my Lakeville neighborhood proudly zips up and down Wells Hills Road in a bright yellow Smart car. I’ve also noticed that Salsa Fresca, the yummy Mexican cafe in Millerton, uses a Smart car for its delivery business.

I’m sure the drivers of those energy-efficient vehicles feel good about doing their part to reduce America’s dependence on fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions. And while driving those very small vehicles is not my cup of green tea, I applaud the efforts of those who do.

What I’m very skeptical about, though, is this notion that we can transform our economy by creating “green jobs.†You know, if we just spread the gospel and provide the right incentives, windmills and solar panels will sprout everywhere. If we can start a patriotic movement — what Thomas Friedman of The New York Times calls the Green Tea Party — to galvanize the country around the idea that we can spend money on green energy to create jobs, then we can reorganize our economy and save the planet at the same time. Sounds simple enough.

Friedman should take a look at what happened in Spain, which embarked on a green jobs initiative of its own in the last decade. According to one university study, for every green job created in Spain, an average of 2.2 other jobs was lost. And most of the green jobs proved to be temporary. Worse yet, the study calculated that since 2000, Spain spent $774,000 to create each “green job.†The statistics were even more grim in the wind energy sector, where subsidies of more than $1.3 million per job were needed.

As a Washington Post column by Robert Bryce made clear last week, while green energy has “great emotional and political appeal,†we should take a hard look at the realities before pumping billions of taxpayers’ dollars into risky schemes that could very well fail to deliver.

Take solar and wind power, for example. Both require vast amounts of land to produce relatively little energy, resulting in what some conservationists call “energy sprawl.†And the experience of Denmark has shown that those green energy supplies must typically be offset by traditional fossil fuels on cloudy and calm days, resulting in minimal greenhouse gas reductions overall.

Bryce, an author who has written several books on energy, uncovered other interesting tidbits about green energy: scant evidence that significant new jobs can be created; the United States has already “improved its energy efficiency as much as or more than other developed countriesâ€; and electric cars will not substantially reduce our demand for oil.

But here’s the kicker: Electric and hybrid cars rely heavily on battery technology. And in order to function properly, both batteries and wind turbines require certain rare earth elements. Between 95 and 100 percent of those elements are controlled by one country — China, which already owns almost a quarter of our foreign-owned debt.

We’ve sent enough jobs and money to China. Do we really want to outsource the raw materials for our green energy technology to the crowd that gave us the repression of Tibet and Tiananmen Square?

If that’s the kind of tea they’re serving in Beijing, I think I’ll pass, Mr. Friedman. Coffee anyone?

Lakeville resident Terry Cowgill is a former editor and senior writer at The Lakeville Journal Company and host of Conversations With Terry Cowgill on CATV6. He can be reached at terrycowgill@gmail.com.