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proi ts, which in turn may well be invested in boosting the Spanish econ-
omy more broadly. Besides, government has a funny habit of spending
whatever money it has. Were tax collections not used to support clean
energy, they could well have been spent on something else.
So much for the dour Spanish precedent. Yet just because critics have
used specious arguments to at ack claims in favor of green jobs doesn't
mean the original claims themselves are correct. It is easy to count jobs
building wind farms and installing solar panels, but there is lit le in the
way of rigorous research or argument to support claims that workers
will benei t on net, let alone that clean energy is the future of the U.S.
economy. Most of the macroeconomic models that are used to proj-
ect the long-term consequences of a shit to new energy sources i nd
that the United States suf ers, usually just slightly, from the transition.
New energy sources are typically more expensive than traditional ones,
so increasing reliance on them slows economic activity; this phenom-
enon is exacerbated if the transition is so rapid that people are forced
to replace old energy-using equipment before they otherwise would
have.
h at said, these models are usually ill designed to capture potential
growth in new energy industries.
59
h eir conclusions that the economy
will be hurt are thus inevitable. Analysts have tried to remedy these
shortfalls by performing industry-by-industry estimates. h ey ot en i nd
that signii cant economic benei ts in new energy industries can out-
weigh losses in traditional ones such as coal mining and oil production.
But they still usually miss the bigger picture: the rest of the economy
consistently suf ers from slightly higher energy costs, as well as from the
diversion of people and machines to energy production. h e penalty
elsewhere is usually modest, so long as the transition isn't too fast and
the new technologies aren't exorbitantly expensive. But over the whole
economy, it can add up. Without new economic models that carefully
combine industry-level insight with broader economic constraints, the
most it seems one can say overall about the impact of new energy indus-
tries is that, so long as there's an orderly transition between technolo-
gies over time, it is likely to be pret y small either way.
h at is, of course, unless there's another big force capable of trans-
forming the entire picture. h
ose who claim that clean energy is critical
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