• Fuel expenditures drop by 4.9 percent in 2020, with a total cost savings of $3.8 billion in reduced consumption of gasoline and diesel, as a result of increased investment in energy efficiency and cleaner fuels.
• Two million jobs will be created by 2020, the result of a sustained growth in labor demand of .9 percent each year, which is consistent with the business-as-usual case.
• The economy, including personal income, will continue to grow at a rate of 2.4 percent per year.
• Offsets in a cap-and-trade program help to reduce costs.
• Divergence from the AB 32 Scoping Plan (i.e. limiting requirements for oil companies or utilities), increases costs and shifts them to Californians and small businesses.
Makes you wonder why Meg Whitman, Republican frontrunner for governor and apparent tax-evader extraordinaire, opposes this visionary environmental legislation and is running on a platform of repeal.
@David - good to hear from you! I actually read Environmental Economics fairly regularly. In response to their Oct 29 post "The simple math of green jobs," Tim comes up with his JUICE equation P = G + U + B, where P is the total number of potentially employable people in the US, G is green jobs, B is brown jobs, and U is unemployment. It seems to me that this equation leaves out the possibility of an employment scenario where population is much greater than the number of available jobs (the situation we are in now). Tim treats P as a measure of population (see his first footnote), instead of jobs. Following that logic, new jobs could be created to accept values from U to G without taking any values from B.
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ReplyDeleteIf Congress wants more and better jobs in the US, it should do things like create a permanent tax break for companies that invest in research and development, make it easier for foreigners who get science and engineering Ph.D.s at American universities to stick around after graduation, and spend serious time and money improving the nation's infrastructure, including the electric grid and broadband network. Such initiatives will not create many jobs that can be tallied on a spreadsheet. What they will do is more important: lay the groundwork for businesses to innovate and grow.