Obama talked in his presidential campaign about mitigating climate change through stimulating green technologies and so creating millions of new jobs and at the same time energy independence - a "win win win".
What is the reality behind this comforting vision? Can environmental policies really work in stimulating the economy. Would the number of jobs created by expanding solar industry would be greater than the number lost through, say, a shrinking coal-mining industry. Professor Stavins at Harvard, via the Wall Street Journal offers the following analogy:
“Let’s say I want to have a dinner party. It’s important that I cook dinner, and I’d also like to take a shower before the guests arrive. You might think, Well, it would be really efficient for me to cook dinner in the shower. But it turns out that if I try that I’m not going to get very clean and it’s not going to be a very good dinner. And that is an illustration of the fact that it is not always best to try to address two challenges with what in the policy world we call a single-policy instrument.”
Photo by phault, flickr
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