Spectacularly batshit

Note: I apologise sincerely to those of you with an aversion to vulgarity. I’ve found that when the situation is excessively vulgar it could most accurately be described in vulgar terms. Which is why they exist.

Of the many fascinating facets of the fantastical energy transition, job creation has to be among my favourites. There are such promises being made by politicians and activists, such rock-hard conviction that the transition will lead to a burst in employment — clean, sustainable employment — that it’s impossible not to marvel at the ingenuity of propaganda.

As it happens, I have one family member that spent several years working in wind power and another family member who works in solar power. What this means is that I now know for a fact something I previously only suspected: there cannot be millions of green jobs bursting into existence thanks to the transition simply because this is outside the realm of the physically possible.

I’ve written on the subject before but today I’d like to share something else: a report by the Financial Times lamenting the shortage of green talent. (Here and henceforth the word green is used without the quotation marks it deserves because I can’t be bothered. You know as well as I do these jobs are not green.)

The report makes for a highly amusing read, with observations such as “Investments alone don’t manufacture blades, navigate vessels or operate wind farms,” and “People are not developing green skills at anywhere near a fast enough rate to meet climate targets.”

Or how about this: “Sustainability analysts, specialists and managers are among the top 10 job titles for which postings have grown fastest in the past year. But the share of professionals touting profiles that mention green skills or experience has not kept pace.”

And, of course, this: “In the US, meanwhile, an engineer working in the oil sector earns far more than in a similar engineering job elsewhere. A low carbon engineer does not command a similar wage premium.”

Leaving aside the mystery of what a low-carbon engineer does that’s different from what, say, an electrical engineer does, the problem with a skills shortage appears to be very real. The bigger problem is that it remains unclear what exactly a green skill means.

Judging by the contents of the FT report, green skills seem to include installing solar panels, wind turbines, and heat pumps, and also putting up home insulation. These are skills that once upon a time in a sane reality used to be called things like electrical competence, construction skills, and, well, masonry.

Now they’re called green skills and there aren’t enough people with them. But that’s not the best part at all. The best part is that people from the oil and gas industry refuse to switch to wind and solar because they get paid better in oil and gas.

Hilarious as this may be, it is nowhere near as hilarious as this open admission by a senior policy fellow at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics.

According to Anna Valero (emphasis mine because I enjoyed that part immensely):

European governments could learn from the approach the US has taken, offering additional tax incentives to companies that pay prevailing wages and hire apprentices, she adds. But they will also need to put more thought into mapping out career paths in sectors that are likely to see “an intense period of installation”, after which work will dial down to ongoing maintenance.

How about that, eh? Translated from Transionese into Common Human, that second sentence means employers need to find ways to attract highly qualified or at least qualifiable workers by offering them short periods of full-time employment followed by much longer periods of, well, no employment.

Because once you build the panel structure or hoist the turbine on its column, install the inverters, connect all the cables and check if everything works, that’s it. Yon don’t need two dozen people monitoring the output of your solar or wind farms.

The solution? Investments, which are actually government subsidies because the companies involved in all of these green activities appear unwilling to spend their own money on training more staff for what is essentially sporadic employment.

You’d suspect these companies know something the transition party doesn’t or wouldn’t want to hear about, wouldn’t you? Perhaps the fact that if they cannot guarantee long-term full-time employment to a lot of new people they deem such an investment not worth making. Or maybe they have their own doubts about the success of the transition.

Or, finally, maybe they just don’t have the money to invest, what with all that inflation right now in Europe that we don’t talk about because it’s so much more empowering and spirit-lifting to celebrate how we got unhooked from Russian gas, and LNG for the win, that’s not a dependency, and who cares if it costs a lot of billions, etc.

“We will have no problems with skills shortages as soon as these jobs are attractive in terms of wages and working conditions . . . and if people want to go to these jobs even if they are not green at heart,” one Germany employment researcher told the FT.

Well that’s a simple enough solution, no doubt about that. And like so many simple solutions, it’s utterly useless. Because you can’t just pull money out of thin air to give to your workers. Wages depend on the company’s financial performance (and other things but let’s leave these aside). They also depend on the nature of the work.

You don’t need people with PhDs in electrical engineering to install a wind panel. You don’t need materials scientists to build a wind turbines. While it’s true that work in wind and solar (and heat pumps but I’m not sure about that) requires some special qualifications, they are not the sort of qualifications that command six-figure annual salaries. Sad but true.

There is also the tiny little problem with all the transmission lines that need to be build for the net-zero world of tomorrow. And when I say “tiny little problem” I mean a humongous, currently and for the observable insurmountable hurdle of not enough linemen. It takes years to train a lineman. These are years that, according to transition pushers, we don’t have. It’s a tragedy in the making.

So, not only do we not have the raw materials this transition needs but we don’t have the people to make it happen. How about that for exemplary forward planning?

Incidentally, I was fascinated to learn that the phrase “batshit crazy” originates from an older phrase, “bats in the belfry”, which means, per the eloquent definition of Urban Dictionary, “A person who is batshit crazy is so nuts that not only is their belfry full of bats, but so many bats have been there for so long that the belfry is coated in batshit.”

I’ve heard that bat guano makes high-quality fertiliser, by the way, apropos of nothing.