Grendel wrote on Jul 10^th, 2009 at 12:16pm:

You've hit the nail on the head there boof, for old people like yourself it is hard to accept change and retraining when your stuck in the old fashioned ways but all the young people being trained now can be trained in clean Green future jobs.
It will take a while to phase out those old ways of doing things so people like you can still expect to have work until you retired.

What I do know is that those jobs in Spain were all government created, as we all know private enterprise are much better than government at keeping costs down so when we have a study on Green jobs that are non government we might have a more reliable model to look at.
The other point is the Spanish government built wind farms with that money, possibly not the best choice in Spain.

On even more investigations into boofy's cut and pastes we find this-

"The Heritage Foundation and its conservative allies have been using unfounded evidence to claim that investments in renewable energy lead to higher prices and job losses. The report that they are touting was written by Professor Gabríel Calzada Álvarez, a virtually unknown scholar in Spain who works for a small research institute with clear ties to the energy industry and the extreme right-wing of the Spanish Conservative Party.

The reality is that Spain has, over the past several years, pursued an ambitious renewable energy program designed to turn it around from dependence on foreign sources of energy. The country is now lauded as a global leader in alternative energy technologies such as wind, biogas, and, more recently, concentrated solar thermal.

Leaders from the Fundación Ideas para el Progreso—the Ideas Foundation for Progress—have written the following letter debunking the Álvarez report. Jesús Caldera is the vice president of the IDEAS Foundation and former minister for public works, and Carlos Mulas-Granados is the executive director of the IDEAS Foundation and former economic advisor to Prime Minister Zapatero. Here's what they have to say:

In the past weeks, there has been considerable debate in the United States regarding the job creating potential of the green recovery plans of the new Administration focusing on the recent experiences of Spain. We were surprised to learn that one of the principle pieces of evidence used by opponents of President Obama’s green recovery program is a deeply flawed report from a little known Spanish research institute funded in part by the oil industry. We write to you to inform you of the problems of using information in this report and ask that after learning the facts you correct the record about green jobs in Spain."
So now you're posting anti Green ganda that is funded by the oil industry, ohh boofy, you've done it again.

"Official figures from the Spanish Ministry of Labour prove that the sector of renewable energies has created 175,000 jobs, 82% of which are high-quality jobs. While representing only one percent of the country’s labor force, the sector is so productive that it already generates 20% of the electricity consumed by Spanish households and companies. The official projections from ISTAS (Syndicated Institute for labor, environment and health) also shows that this sector is set to create 270,000 more jobs in Spain by 2020. If this trend were to hold true in the US economy, which is more than ten times larger than that of Spain, this suggests the creation of over 5 million clean energy jobs in just ten years. Today, this may seem a distant reality, but if Spain can achieve these results we have no doubt that the US can too. The new Administration should be commended for its ambition, and we in Spain would be more than happy to support their leadership with our modest experience. "

Wow, GREEN power in just a short time already generates 20% of Spanish power.

How many jobs will be lost as a result of peak oil?

pjb05 wrote on Jul 10^th, 2009 at 5:35pm:


How long does it take to convert all the vehicles in Australia to LPG? It doesn't have to run out overnight to have an effect. a 2 year decline in supply is enough to have a major impact.

muso wrote on Jul 10^th, 2009 at 5:49pm:


Peak oil doesn't mean the supply will decline but that it will no longer increase. The supply could plateau for quite a while. The optimists say that the effect of higher oil price and better technologies will mean a lot of oil that is not regarded as extractable today will do so in the future. Also that we haven't fully explored all the potential oil bearing geological formations. Also that as the oil price gets higher alternatives will become more attractive and gradually take over and the disruption to our economies will be minimal.