Everyone else seems to be calling it the Green New Deal.
Why shouldn't I?
It's what we need.
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aren’t these “new”jobs mostly just old jobs renamed?
Tom
Your evidence is? Please enlighten
Richard
Government can’t create jobs. The best it can do is move jobs, from the private to the public sector via tax — or from the future to the present, via debt. And in this case, I suspect it’s all a hoax anyway. Sure, Brown can hire some builders to renovate schools. But first of all, how many of his 100,000 were going to be hired by the state anyway? And of those who weren’t, can he be so sure they were all otherwise heading for the dole queue? It’s all a nonsense designed purely to enable him to trot out the line “we are creating 100,000 new jobs while the Tories would do nothing”. For Brown’s plan to work, no one must challenge his figures. And I suspect no one will.
“everybody else” ? The Guardian and nef is not exactly representative of a broad range of opinion, especially when you were one of the authors of nef’s Green New Deal Report. You have to add a few more voices to be able to use the phrase “everybody else”
Peter
So the government can’t create jobs, eh? Try telling that to everyone in the NHS, state schools, the army, the police, the judiciary and much more.
All non-jobs are they?
You do live in a very strange world.
It’s about time that you noticed that who owns an entity makes remarkably little difference to those who work in it – did all RBS people become the holders of non-jobs the moment it passed into state control?
Richard
Marksany
Barack Obama do you?
Richard
But if they are ‘created’, who will they be for? There seems pretty strong evidence that the last million jobs that were created almost all went to migrant workers, coming into the country to work.
With EU membership and current rules, that cannot be avoided, and neither can the EU labour liberalisation offer that Peter Mandelson has made to 150 countries. With the latter, if cheap workers come in and there is an oursourcing wave, it will actually mean more job losses for people here.
I cant understand why the media has such a short term memory from one story to the next, and fails to ask these obvious questions in relation to ‘job creation.
marksany has already nailed the ‘everyone else’.
Green New Deal
It is only green if you use the same sort of voodoo accountancy that you, rightly, spend most of your time criticising.
Cheap and shoddy gimmicks like ‘Zero Carbon Homes’ are not green because they disregard the energy used / carbon dioxide emissions involved in demolition and trucking away of wastes and the energy involved in construction materials. It makes far more sense to refurbish or convert existing urban buildings but the UK VAT regime encourages demolition and new build.
If UK national, regional and local government were serious about reducing carbon dioxide emissions they would increase the amount of insulation in both new and existing buildings. Wind turbines in urban areas and solar panels in northern latitudes are an expensive, in both money and energy terms, joke.
As for ”investing in superfast broadband” some of us remember the promises of ‘Broadband Britain’ made but never delivered a decade ago.
Heres a list of jobs,(a) Hospital ships for the Worlds trouble spots
instead of Aid,We Build them, Sail them,we Staff Them.(B) High Speed Rail net Work,we Build them,We Own them.(c)Housebuilding
programme (d) Intercity Bike lanes (e) Alternative Energy programme ,and I,m sure the readers have hundreds of their own
projects they can put forward into a think tank.
I think one should be wary of one dimensional solutions to what are undeniable problems. Green sounds a little like Socialism of a different colour. That does not make it wrong, but it does not make it wholly right either. What matters is what works, not what is idealogically correct. I can forsee a host of quangos and talking heads in the Green Industry. Make sure engineers, builders, plumbers, electricians etc also have their say, not just journalists and intellectuals.
Bill
Pity you obviously haven’t read the Green New Deal
we’re asking for insulation, double glazing, and the like. We’re not calling for wind turbines (although we’re not saying no to them either). But we do have tide power, and there’s no reason why we can’t make green technology for use elsewhere
As for the VAT point – agreed entirely
It sounds to me like we’re on a wave length – not in any form of opposition
Richard
PS – Stephen – I also agree with you – Green is not a banner worth using unless it’s tainted with practical reality. I’m a green – but I also live in the rela world where compromises have to happen
Windmills and solar panels are useless if the weather is no good and at night. This means you need conventional generation as back up, which at the moment means gas turbines, as they need to be powered up quickly when the wind drops. I am surprised there is not more promotion of geothermal, since everywhere in the world has got it, you just need to drill downwards and it is always on..