A study by a Spanish economist showing that as many as 20 jobs are lost for every “green job” created, has been criticized by the Spanish government as being “simplistic” and “reductionist” and based on “non-rigorous methodology.”
The study (here in pdf) by associate professor Gabriel Calzada, who has received funding from a variety of corporations including ExxonMobil, has been sited frequently by GOP members of Congress in opposing cap-and-trade provisions in a federal climate bill — most recently by Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID) at a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on green jobs held this morning (July 21, 2009).
Looking exasperated following Crapo’s comments, Committee Chair Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced into the record an evaluation by the Spanish government that takes the Calzada report to task.
The government document includes this letter sent on May 20th to Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) from Teresa Ribera Rodríguez, Spain’s Secretary of State for Climate Change, expressing the official Spanish government view of the Calzada paper. It’s available here in it’s original form as a pdf file.
A second part of Boxer’s submission is a document produced by the government of Navarra, a small region in northern Spain that the journal Nature dubbed, “one of the world’s wind-energy giants.”
As the Navarra report shows, Calzada has the story backwards.
Sixty-five percent of the electricity used in Navarra comes from renewable sources — primarily wind — built over the last twenty years. Over those years, the region went from having the highest unemployment rate in Spain to having the lowest rate, today.
“Under President Obama’s leadership,” the report concludes, “the United States’ decisive support of renewable energies…will aid in rapidly overcoming the current economic crisis…”
The full Navarra report can be downloaded here (pdf).
Still, just because Calzada’s methodology have been slapped-down and his links with global warming deniers exposed, don’t expect the GOP faithful to stop quoting him. The study is harder to kill than Rasputin.
