Today’s FT has a very interesting letter in response to the Gore/Moon op-ed of a few days ago. Here is what it says:

Sir, Ban Ki-moon and Al Gore insist that “growing green” become the new “mantra” for government spending (“Green growth is essential to any stimulus”, February 17). They are right that we should eliminate environmentally harmful subsidies, but wrong on three grounds that subsidies for technologies they prefer should follow. It would be far better to eliminate government subsidies for politically favoured technologies generally.

First, to truly be “pro-poor”, we must address the needs of the 884m who lack safe drinking water and the 1.6m who, according to World Health Organisation estimates, die annually from indoor air pollution caused by low-tech burning of sustainable fuels such as dung. A nice, modern coal-fired power plant could run water treatment facilities and eliminate the indoor air pollution for much of the world’s poor. Solar panels can’t yet. Waiting for new technologies that are years from availability means millions of the world’s poorest will fall ill and die. No subsidies for any technology, but put resources into solutions that work for the poor today, not in 20 years.

Second, the green jobs literature focuses almost entirely on boosting low labour productivity employment. Instead of defining a job as “green” because it uses a lot of labour, we should look at what that labour produces. Efficient use of all resources, including labour, generates the wealth that helps the poor become less poor. What we need is high labour productivity jobs that generate enough wealth to pay decent wages, not more subsistence level work that requires subsidies.

Finally, before we launch any mass greening of the economy, a consensus must be reached on what it means to be green. As part of a forthcoming study of the green jobs literature, my co-authors and I examined the definition of “green” used in various recent green jobs proposals and found that it means little beyond “technologies the authors like”. This is particularly clear with respect to nuclear power. Many studies dismiss it entirely as insufficiently green; others focus on its lack of carbon emissions and embrace at least some uses. The important point is that what politicians like Mr Gore prefer is irrelevant to meeting people’s needs – what actually works is a better test of which technologies deserve investment.

It’s easy to chant “grow green”; it’s much harder to come up with concrete steps to reduce environmental footprints – as demonstrated by Mr Gore’s massive personal carbon footprint from his house, house boat, idling limousines outside speeches and use of private jets.

Andrew P. Morriss
H. Ross & Helen Workman Professor of Law and Business
Professor, Institute for Government and Public Affairs
University of Illinois,
Champaign, IL, US