The American Spectator

A little over a year ago Chris Horner, among others, directed attention to a Spanish study conducted by Dr. Gabriel Calzada of King Juan Carlos University on environmentalism-driven economic incentives, which found that for every “green” job created due to government programs, 2.2 Spanish jobs were destroyed.

Today in Wall Street Journal Europe, Carlo Stagnaro and Luciano Lavecchia of Italian think tank Istituto Bruno Leoni introduce a similar study they conducted in their country, and they determined the employment effect from “green” incentives was more than twice as destructive as Spain’s:

…One green job costs on average as much 4.8 jobs in the entire economy, or 6.9 jobs in the industrial sector. The same amount of subsidies that have already been given or committed could produce nearly five times as many jobs if allowed to be spent by the private sector elsewhere in the economy.

Our results are largely consistent with the evidence provided by Professor Gabriel Calzada of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, who found that in Spain, one green job costs on average as much as 2.2 “dirty” jobs. The reason why the Italian figure is more than twice as high is mostly because Italy, unlike Spain, is technology importer, not a producer.

Our figures only seem to confirm what is intuitive: That the green economy may be very profitable for those who receive the subsidies, but that they are detrimental to the overall economy.

Stagnaro and Lavecchia go into a good amount of detail explaining how they arrived at their conclusions. Warning: Despite what the authors’ claim, their findings will be counterintuitive to environmental activists, socialists, liberal bloggers, and the Obama administration — if you’ll permit me to be quadruply redundant.