about this debate
Fighting climate changemeans transforming the energy infrastructure;transforming such a huge infrastructure requires the labour of a great manypeople; new sources of employment are particularlyappealing in a recession. Bringing together climate policy andemployment policy seems to some to offer a double whammy(n..沉重的打击), with more green jobs in a cleaner economy. But is this more than a cynical（GRE词汇：a.愤世嫉俗的）attempt to repackage(v.重新包装） climate measures that on their own do not appeal to votersand businesses by constraining business and distorting labour markets? Canthe interests of labour, capital and the environment ever really come together?
BACK GOUND
Hype about fuel cells
Flower power
A clean-tech start-up(n.创业) generates lots of excitement and a little electricity
Feb 25th 2010 | SAN FRANCISCO| From The Economist print edition
“WE BELIEVE that we can have the same kind ofimpact on energy that the mobile phone had on communications.” So saysK.R. Sridhar, the boss of Bloom Energy, which on February 24th unveiled what itclaims is a revolutionary fuel cell. Thanks to such grandiose（GRE词汇：a.浮夸的）pronouncements and a vigorous public-relations blitz（n.闪电战）, the “Bloom Box”, as the company’s product has beendubbed, has attracted plenty of headlines. But there are good reasons for skepticisms（n.怀疑论）.
That Bloom is now being promoted so loudly is hardly surprising. The firm,which has kept its work secret for the past eight years, has attracted a hefty（a.相当多的） $400mfrom venture capitalists, including some who bet on the Segway, a high-tech scooter（n.踏板车） that promised butfailed to change the world. A successfulinitial public offering or a sale to a strategic investor would allow Bloom’sbackers to reap a return on their investment. It would also give a fillip（n.刺激） to the clean-tech sector, at which Silicon Valley’s moneymenhave thrown billions of dollars in the hope of hitting a Google-like payday.
Mr Sridhar paints a glowing picture of the potential of Bloom’stechnology, which uses a series of discs, made from zirconium oxide(n.氧化锆) and coated in special inks, to induce a chemicalreaction that turns natural gas, among other fuels, into electricity. This is more efficient, and therefore greener, than burninggas to generate electricity in a power plant and then transmitting it throughthe grid. The firm has produced some 100-kilowatt units for corporatecustomers, costing $700,000-800,000. But in five to ten years, Mr Sridhar says,it will be able to make smaller Bloom Boxes, designed to power single homes,for less than $3,000.
Generous state and federal subsidies for fuel cells should help Bloom sellto big businesses. Thanks to these, and to savings on its electricity bill,eBay, which is one of several companies that has been trying out Bloom Boxes,reckons its investment in them will pay for itself in three years. But manyfirms, including experienced manufacturers such as General Electric, have their eye on（v.关注） the corporatemarket, too—which helps explain, along with filings from car companies workingon fuel-cell batteries, why patents for fuel cells far exceed those for othersources of green power (see chart). Moreover, the moreoften subsidies are claimed, the less keen on them governments tend to become.
Green jobs
Back to the City
Britain may get green jobs, but not the sort ministers promise
Jan 7th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
BRUISED（v.挫伤） by the worst recession since the second world war, and staring glumly（adv.阴沉地） at a megalithic（adj.巨石的） national debt that their children will be repaying decades hence, few Britons are keen for finance to make up as big a slice of the national economy in the future as it has in the past. Politicians from all parties are keen to talk about new ways for Britain to earn a living.
One popular idea is to turn to greenery: Britain (like the rest of the world) must cut its emissions of greenhouse gases in any case, so it makes sense to profit from the endeavor. The claim that greenery is the future goes back to the fiscal-stimulus package launched by the government last year to revive the credit-crunched（adj.信用岌岌可危的） economy. Gordon Brown, the prime minister, was beating the drum (v.鼓吹) again in an interview on January 3rd, claiming that a “strong industrial strategy” would turn Britain into the world’s “leader in low-carbon industry”.
On the face of it（表面上看）, Britain ought to be attractive for budding green industrialists(v词组：培养绿色工业家). There is plenty of rain and wind for renewable-energy firms to play with, and a reasonably well-educated and scientifically literate workforce to build better batteries, turbines（n.涡轮机） and nuclear-power plants. In normal times finance is generally available. And ambitious targets to cut emissions ought to ensure a big market to sell into.
Yet out there in the real world of factories and small businesses, not much seems to be happening. The day after the prime minister’s interview, it emerged that, thanks to a dearth of British suppliers,
A special report on climate change and the carbon economy
The green slump(GRE词汇：n.暴跌)
Why investors have been deserting clean energy
Dec 3rd 2009 | From The Economist print edition
THE slogan that BP adopted in 2000, “Beyond Petroleum”, was brilliantly unforgettable. It linked the company’s name with the bright, clean future which, the flower/sun logo implied, was to be found on the far side of fossil fuels. But that, as it turned out, was unfortunate, for the company is no longer hurrying towards those fresh green pastures.
Shell, which also took a sizeable punt(n. the monetary pound of Ireland) on renewable energy, admits that its strategy has changed. Earlier this year its then chief executive, Jeroen van der Veer, said of wind, solar and hydrogen, “I don’t expect them to grow much at Shell from here.” Further investments in renewable energy, he said, would focus on biofuels. Linda Cook, who resigned in May as head of Shell’s gas and power business, said that wind and solar “struggle to compete with the other investment opportunities we have in our portfolio”.
Whereas policymakers have been scurrying from conference to conference to urge the world on towards a green future, investors have been walking away from it. For one businessman the attendance at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen in May said it all. “There was the usual raft of bigwigs (n. an important person)on the panel, but the audience was just hangers-on—journalists, PR people and so forth. There were no serious delegates there.”
The clean-energy business has had a hard year. Investment in the sector tanked in late 2008, as did share prices (see chart 2). Private equity and venture capital held up a little better, but not much. The beginning of 2009 was “scary”, according to Michael Liebreich, chief executive of New Energy Finance, a consultancy.
The industry suffered particularly badly in the credit crunch. Almost by definition, renewable energy sources have low running costs but high up-front (n.预先) costs. And because they are regulated assets with long-term pre-defined revenue streams, they are particularly suited to debt finance, and therefore tend to have high debt-to-equity ratios（n债务对股本比率）(typically 80-20). “When the project finance disappears, you’ve got a problem,” says Robert Clover, director of alternative-energy equity research at HSBC. He points out that some of the banks that suffered worst during the crisis—RBS, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual and Fortis—were also among the biggest in clean-energy finance.
As the flow of finance to electricity generators dried up, so did the orders to equipment manufacturers. Mr Clover reckons that wind-turbine manufacturers’ order books so far this year are down by 55-60% on the same period in 2008.
Public awareness of global warming picked up significantly about three years ago. Now most consumers claim to be concerned about it, and public concern is one reason why companies have been branding themselves green. Energy companies boasted of their diversification out of fossil fuels. Businesses with small carbon footprints, such as banks and retailers, promised to go carbon-neutral.
But consumers’ commitment to greenery is rather doubtful. There is a big market for organic products (though it has got smaller since the recession), but shoppers are more concerned about their families’ health than about the planet, and few are prepared to pay premium prices for green products. BA, for instance, has been offering carbon offsets with its flights for the past four years, but finds that only around 3% of customers buy them.
In the absence of pressure from consumers, governments need to give businesses a shove(GRE词汇：v 野蛮地或猛烈地推). That was the idea behind the Kyoto protocol, which aims to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by getting countries to accept binding targets with timetables attached. It divided the world into developed countries, which are required to cut their emissions, and developing countries, which are not. When rich countries ratify the protocol, they have to commit themselves to reducing their emissions by a certain percentage below a date of their choosing (mostly 1990)—Britain by 12.5%, Japan and Canada by 6%, and so on. The idea is that in order to meet these targets governments should introduce policies that send price signals to businesses to shift investment away from dirty products and processes to cleaner ones.
Global carbon-dioxide emissions have risen by 20% since the protocol was signed in 1997, so the plan has evidently not worked all that well. There are three main reasons for that. First, rich countries have exported some of their dirty industry to the developing world. Steel, cement, cars, fridges, computers, toasters, kettles and all the paraphernalia（n. 随身用品；贴身用品）of modern life the production of which used to cause pollution in developed countries are now made in China and other developing countries where emissions are not capped (v. 胜过，超过)—and have risen partly as a result of that shift.
Second, the world’s biggest emitter when Kyoto was signed, America, has not ratified the protocol, and the biggest polluter per person among countries with significant emissions, Australia, did so only two years ago.
It might reasonably be argued that the blame should fall on those countries’ governments, rather than on the treaty itself; but a treaty in which the most important parties play no part cannot be said to be a success.
Third, some countries have failed to cut their emissions as promised. In 2007 Canada’s emissions were 29% above their 1990 level and Spain’s 57%. But there is no need for them to miss their targets, thanks to the countries of the former Soviet Union. Their dirty industries collapsed during the 1990s, so they are awash（GRE词汇：被海水淹没的） with carbon credits that can be bought for a small consideration. Countries in danger of failing to meet their Kyoto targets can simply buy what is known in the industry as “Russian hot air”. As the 2012 deadline for meeting Kyoto targets approaches, there is a growing appetite for those meaningless credits.
Even in countries that have cut their emissions substantially, business is not always getting the right signals. Britain’s apparently creditable performance, for instance, is less the result of a well-designed policy than the “dash for gas” in the 1980s, spurred （v.刺激，激励）by the hostility to the coal industry of its then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Attempts to get a renewable-energy industry going have flopped（v.惨败）.
Britain is not alone in finding it hard to work out how to send business the right signals. Policies that are effective, efficient and politically palatable （GRE词汇: a. 美味的，愉快的） have proved elusive（GRE词汇：a. 逃避的，难捉摸的） everywhere.
Leaders
Wanted: green engineers
The world needs more of them, notes Oliver Morton
Nov 13th 2009 | From The World in 2010 print edition
Getty Images Isambard's kingdom to come
Regardless of the outcome of the Copenhagen conference in December 2009, one of the most pressing anti-climate-change needs will be the ability to get things done in 2010 and beyond. The commitments already made by some large economies require an extremely large capacity to get new energy systems in place quickly. That includes making sure that there are the people around to design and build them.
The infrastructure needed to make a large dent in the world’s emissions is daunting (GRE: a. 令人气馁的). What is unusual is not the scale of investment, but that much of it has to be spent on new capabilities. With the use of coal worldwide expected to double by 2030, for example, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies will be crucial. The amount of pipelining（n. 管道；（信息）渠道）, geological surveying and chemical engineering needed for this is not unprecedented （GRE： a. 前所未有的） compared with what already exists in the oil, gas and mining industries. But it is vastly larger than today’s CCS capacity, and the people needed cannot just be borrowed from the current fossil-fuel industry.
The nuclear industry is also
bedeviled （v. 使痛苦）
by labour-force issues, at all skill levels. For the past few decades very few Western countries have been producing nuclear engineers; if the nuclear industry is to expand again, over the next decade it will need thousands of engineers who are at present nowhere to be found. And if the supply of expert engineers is tight for builders and operators, it will be tight for regulators, too—regulators who will be sorely (a. 剧烈地) needed if a new generation of nuclear-power plants is to enjoy, and deserve, public confidence.
Renewables do not face these issues in quite so pressing a form; the solar and wind industries reap the benefits of the production line in ways that nuclear and carbon-capture technologies, with their large installations, do not. This is one of the reasons that governments like renewables: they provide jobs. Retrofitting（v. 翻新，改进） homes for greater energy efficiency also offers this advantage on a large scale (which makes one wonder why it is not a higher priority). Even so the renewables sector will also be competing for designers and engineers.
To a large extent this is a market problem that markets can solve; if the demand is created, companies will find ways to get the work done. But there are some specific things that governments can do to help. One is to fund research with a strong emphasis on energy engineering and science. New breakthroughs, however welcome, are not the point here; though new technologies will be a boon （GRE：a .恩惠） in the 2030s and 2040s, the realities of large-scale change mean that, for the moment, energy transformation is a come-as-you-are party. But breakthroughs are not the only thing research produces. Nuclear engineers are scarce in part because there has been little ongoing research to captivate students.
The people needed cannot just be borrowed from the fossil-fuel industry
Another smart policy will be to re-examine the extent to which governments subsidize high-tech jobs in other industries, notably defense, tying up talent. There are a lot of opportunities in green technology for laid-off missile designers. A third idea, for those who can afford it, is to reap the benefits of the educational successes of other countries by importing people from places where many aspire to become, and qualify as, engineers.
Who wants to be an engineer?
And it would be nice to find ways to spread that aspiration more widely. In a number of countries (Britain is an example) engineering does not carry much cultural cachet（n. 优良品质）. A pride in the engineered past—remember Isambard Brunel—is accompanied by apathy towards the engineering of the present. It is neither fruitful nor desirable for governments to meddle（GRE: v.干涉） in broad cultural attitudes. But leaders of the environmental movement, and politicians, who aspire to such leadership, might do well to encourage the young to apply their idealism to their choice of career path.
It’s all very well to recycle, pester（v. 纠缠） your parents about fuel efficiency and aspire to holidays that need no flights. But the best thing a bright young person can do to help rid civilization of fossil fuels is get an education in engineering.
Business
Asia's green-tech rivals
Clean-energy competition in the region will be intense
Nov 13th 2009 | From The World in 2010 print edition
By Kenneth Cukier
The battle lines are being drawn in Asia over green technologies, as governments adapt their tradition of state influence on industry for an era in which eco-friendly products may spell export success. In China, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere, a big portion of fiscal-stimulus measures is dedicated to green projects. It is seen as a way to create new jobs, cut carbon emissions at home—and sell products abroad.
Globally, governments have budgeted as much as $500 billion for “Green New Deal” projects, estimates HSBC, a bank. Asia accounts for more than three-fifths of the total. Around 20% of this will have been spent by the end of 2009, with most of the rest to be lavished in 2010. Private capital is also pouring in.
Yet where the money is going varies across the region. Some countries are emphasising particular sectors (like solar power) or early-stage technology (such as fuel cells) with an eye towards building a future market. Other initiatives simply apply current technology to reduce domestic emissions (carbon-capture at power plants, for example). Only 15% of the spending is aimed at R&D, notes New Energy Finance, a market-research group.
China, by some measures, has the most ambitious policy. It has dedicated around $220 billion, or one-third of its overall fiscal stimulus, to projects such as wind, solar, hydropower and clean-coal technologies. This will help the country achieve its target of increasing the share of renewable energy to 10% by 2010.
In 2010 a generous subsidy will become available for low-emission cars in 13 big cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Dalian. China will also subsidise 50-70% of the cost of large solar-power projects.
The emphasis on solar energy is as much a lifeline for floundering（GRE:V.挣扎） Chinese firms as it is an effort to reduce emissions. Without subsidies, solar is about four times more expensive than energy from the coal-powered grid. But Chinese firms have emerged as the biggest solar-panel producers in the world—almost all of it exported—just as the industry faces a massive supply glut（GRE: n .供大于求） that is forcing firms to close. By boosting domestic demand, China’s programme has the added goal of absorbing the excess supply, and helping the firms to live.
South Korea has made green technology a cornerstone(n.奠基石) of national policy. The budget, about $60 billion to be spent by 2012, is smaller than China’s but represents a whopping（a.巨大的） four-fifths of South Korea’s total stimulus package. In 2010 tax incentives, subsidies, credit guarantees and spending programmes will begin to be showered on everything from hybrid cars to fitting buildings with energy-efficient LED lighting.
The country plans to spend around 2% of its GDP on green tech through to 2013, to reduce emissions and spur（GRE: v.刺激，激励） a new export industry. Sandwiched（v.夹在中间） between China (with lower costs) and Japan (with superior technology), Korean manufacturers have much catching up to do in green-tech products. Bureaucrats hope to increase South Korea’s global market share in these technologies from 2% to 8% by 2013.
Japan has long been a green-tech pioneer. It has set aside $35 billion of its stimulus, about 6%, for green tech, in areas such as subsidies for residential solar projects. Its green stimulus is smaller than its neighbours’ as it already pours in funds from the regular budget: $22 billion for the environment and conservation in 2009, of which $7 billion was for clean energy including nuclear power. The new government has set ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions. It also promises new spending in 2010 for low-emission cars and energy-efficient appliances.
Other Asian countries have green ambitions. Singapore has a war chest（n.筹措资金） of $450m and in 2010 it will build a 55-hectare (135-acre) clean-tech office park and fund a solar-power research institute. Taiwan plans to spend $1 billion over five years developing solar, LED-lighting and renewable-energy technologies.
Any colour you want so long as it’s...
What exactly counts as green technology? The figures include water and waste projects that are green, but not energy-related. Almost $100 billion of China’s stimulus is for energy-efficient rail transport—which may reduce emissions, but is ultimately just a train system.
Still, the focus on green tech is a natural evolution for Asia’s IT industries. LCD screens and semiconductor chips share the same materials and manufacturing processes as solar photo-voltaic（a.电流的，伏特的） cells; many factories have simply been converted from one to the other. The battery technology for electric cars applies the intellectual property that was developed for electronic gadgets.
Whether the bureaucrats can channel（v.引导） the public largesse efficiently is an open question. Since the immediate purpose is to pump-prime（v.刺激） the economy, the emphasis will be on dispensing the money rather than on the return on investment.
Solar power's bright future in Japan
Land of the rising subsidy
Japanese makers of solar panels are well placed to endure the present glut（GRE：n.供过于求）
Aug 27th 2009 | KAWASAKI | From The Economist print edition
UNTIL five years ago Japan made around half of the world’s solar cells, thanks to its thirst for native energy and its expertise in the related fields of computer chips and flat screens for televisions. Sharp, which alone has made a quarter of all the solar cells ever produced, dominated the industry. But as solar technology matured and demand grew, new companies emerged, notably in China and Taiwan, eroding（GRE：v.侵蚀） Japanese firms’ share of the market to around 20%. Sharp slipped to fourth place among manufacturers in 2008, after Q-Cells of Germany, First Solar of America and Suntech of China.
Factories have mushroomed（v.迅速增长） all over the world in recent years, on the assumption that subsidies and loans for solar power would continue to grow, along with the world economy. Chinese manufacturers’ share grew sixfold from 2004 to 2008, capturing more than one-third of the global market. This prompted fears that Japan’s strength in solar would go the way of computer chips and television screens, in which Japanese firms have lost their dominance over rivals from elsewhere in Asia.
To avoid this fate, Japanese firms have concentrated on improving their technology and adjusting their business models. They have the most sophisticated kit（n.配套元件）, respected brands and healthy balance-sheets, notes Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute, a solar advocacy group. All this should spare them the worst amid the present solar glut. The entire industry’s sales are expected to be below 7,000 megawatts this year. That is roughly half of its capacity. The economic crisis has led to the cancellation of many big projects, and subsidies for solar power in Germany and Spain are being reduced.
Excess supply has forced the prices of solar panels down by more than 40% this year. In Asia factories that recently cropped up（v词组：突然出现） are running at 40% of capacity, with a huge shakeout（n.淘汰） expected, explains Joe Boyce of Gaia Consulting. But Japanese makers are protected because they can manufacture cells less expensively than European firms and have better technology than Chinese ones. They are also sheltered in their home market, where customers prefer domestic products.
Additionally, Japanese companies are following some American and European rivals into electricity generation. Sharp, for example, is negotiating a deal with Enel, Italy’s biggest power company, under which it will build solar panels for use in Enel’s solar-power plants. Enel will help to finance the panel factory and Sharp will take a stake in the plants. In March Mitsubishi, a large trading company, acquired 34% of Amper Central Solar, a power plant in Portugal. Showa Shell, an oil distributor and panel-maker, plans to enter the generation business with Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant.
Many Japanese solar firms are in fact expanding. The country’s four biggest—Sharp, Kyocera, Sanyo and Mitsubishi Electric—are investing billions of dollars to double their production, at least, over the next three years. They expect an increase in demand owing to growing subsidies for renewable energy in America and Japan. The Japanese government reintroduced generous handouts for solar power this year. These had stopped in 2006, when it had seemed that the market could support itself. Between April and June domestic sales increased by 80% in volume, while sales elsewhere slumped（GRE:V.暴跌）. Goldman Sachs says solar sales in Japan may double next year if the Democratic Party of Japan, an opposition party with green policies, wins a general election on August 30th, which it is expected to do.
At the Motosumiyoshi commuter-train station in Kawasaki, a suburb of Tokyo, sleek（a.光泽的） solar panels serve as an awning（GRE: n.遮阳篷，雨篷） over the platform. On a recent sweltering（GRE: a.酷热的） day, they were producing 33 kilowatts of electricity, equivalent to the consumption of 40 homes. The system supplies 15% of the energy used by the station, and avoids many tons of greenhouse-gas emissions annually.
As long as the state’s gravy-train（n.轻易赚大钱的机会） keeps running, solar power’s future is bright in the land of the rising sun.
Clean energy in the Midwest
Greening the rustbelt（n.工业衰退地带）
In the shadow of the climate bill, the industrial Midwest begins to get ready
Aug 13th 2009 | TOLEDO, OHIO | From The Economist print edition
XUNLIGHT CORPORATION, a small manufacturer of solar panels, sits on a quiet street in Toledo. It has a professor as its president, about 100 employees on its payroll—and a lot of bigwig（n.大亨） visitors. In October 2008 Sarah Palin, then the Republican vice-presidential candidate, used Xunlight as the setting for a speech on energy policy. Other guests have included Ohio’s governor, two senators and a congresswoman. And no wonder: the firm provided evidence to support a seductive hope, that the green economy can help to revive the suffering rustbelt.
As the battle over a cap-and-trade（n. 总量管制和交易） bill continues in Congress, the industrial Midwest finds itself playing an awkward role. The climate bill offers two big opportunities, to reduce global warming and boost the green economy in the process. And nowhere are green jobs more loudly promoted than in the rustbelt. On August 5th Barack Obama and Joe Biden, his vice-president, travelled to Indiana and Michigan, two ailing swing（GRE: n.摇摆） states, to announce new grants to develop electric cars. But hopes for those new green jobs are matched by fears that traditional ones will be lost. With the Senate due to debate a cap-and-trade bill next month, the rustbelt and its politicians are at the heart of the battle.
The industrial Midwest has long been in need of a renaissance（GRE:n.复兴）. Its factories have been losing jobs for decades, since long before the recession hit. Michigan, home to America’s biggest carmakers, had a 15.2% unemployment rate in June, compared with a national average of 9.5%.
Green investment presents new hope. The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the Centre for American Progress, a think-tank, estimated in June that the federal stimulus package and a climate bill would spur（GRE: v.刺激，促进） about $150 billion in spending on clean energy each year for the next decade. That spending, in turn, would create an estimated 2.5m jobs, from academic researchers to factory workers making wind turbines. “This is an opportunity for American ingenuity to renew the manufacturing base,” argues Phyllis Cuttino of the Environment Group at the Pew Charitable Trusts.
There are already signs of activity. The Great Lakes Wind Network, based in Ohio, helps local firms sell goods to the wind business. Toledo remains one of the best examples of a town moving from the old economy to a newer one. It has been a hub（GRE: n.中心） for the glass manufacturing since the 19th century. Thanks to innovations in solar technology at the University of Toledo, it is now home to a cluster of firms such as Xunlight. State grants continue to help the university hatch（GRE: v.孵化，这里引申为培养） companies. The Regional Growth Partnership, a local business group, provides venture capital.
In Michigan despair has bred particularly bold action.
In the past five years Jennifer Granholm, the Democratic governor, has dangled（GRE: v. to hold out as an inducement）
more than $1 billion to attract alternative-energy firms, with about $700m in tax credits to develop electric-car batteries. Impressively, Michigan had the third-highest number of clean-tech patents from 1999 to 2008, behind only California and New York, reckons Pew. That number may rise. Last year Michigan passed a requirement for power companies to boost efficiency, along with an order that renewable sources account for 10% of the state’s electricity by 2015. Investments from the federal stimulus will help too. In the share-out on August 5th, Michigan won more grants for electric cars than any other state.
Nevertheless, the clean-energy economy remains small. Though green jobs are increasing in number, they accounted for only 0.6% of jobs in Ohio in 2007, according to Pew. The shares in Michigan and Indiana were even smaller, at 0.4% and 0.5% respectively. Manufacturing, for all its troubles, is a behemoth(n.巨物) in comparison, accounting for 14% of employment in Ohio, 15% in Michigan and 18% in Indiana in 2007. And it is a dirty giant, dependent on cheap coal. The Midwest emits an outsize share of carbon, according to a report from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Indiana is one of the worst offenders, spewing（v.喷出） out 4% of America’s carbon emissions in 2007 though it is home to only 2% of its population.
The fear is that a cap-and-trade bill may expand a promising new sector but devastate a struggling, larger one. Mitch Daniels, the Republican governor of Indiana, has worked hard to maintain his state’s manufacturing base. A price on carbon, he argues, would threaten it.
The version of cap-and-trade passed in June by the House was meant to appease（GRE：v平息，安抚） such critics. It includes help for manufacturers eager to retool for new industries. Allowances would be given away, not auctioned. And at the urging of a congressman from Michigan, the bill would, from 2020, tax imports from countries that do not restrict emissions. But some Democrats are still wary. Three of Indiana’s five House Democrats voted against the bill.
Now a tough battle looms（GRE:v. 隐约出现 ） in the Senate. A new report from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasts that the House bill would depress industrial shipments by 1% between 2012 and 2030 (see chart). But that assumes a quick expansion of nuclear plants, which is unlikely. In the EIA’s worst-case scenario, shipments would drop 3.2%. “They’re huckstering,” huffs George Voinovich, Ohio’s Republican senator, of the green enthusiasts. He wants more support for nuclear power and fears the House bill will transfer wealth from the heartland. On August 6th ten of Mr Voinovich’s Democratic colleagues, including six from the Midwest, wrote to Mr Obama fretting (GRE: v.（使）烦躁，焦虑，担心) that a bill would cripple manufacturing industry.
But in Toledo Xunlight’s president, Xunming Deng, looks forward to a cap-and-trade bill. “Of course there is a cost, but this is an investment for our economy, for our future,” he says. There remains a danger, however, that compromise will produce a clunker（n.失败） of a bill—one that does little to slow climate change, little to revive the old economy and little to boost a new one. Much now depends on a handful of the states in the heartland.
The moderator's opening remarks
Mar 9th 2010 | Oliver Morton
Given the long-term and in some cases rather intangible benefits of environmental prudence（GRE：n.谨慎）, people arguing for measures that will reduce global warming and bring about other desirable but distant ends tend to look for near-term benefits, too. Unsurprisingly, in a recession and its aftermath, jobs have recently had pride of place on that benefit list. As Nancy Pelosi put it when defending the cap-and-trade bill on greenhouse emissions which passed the House of Representatives last year, the American people should be glad of such legislation for four reasons: "jobs, jobs, jobs and jobs".
The proposer's opening remarks
The private sector—not the government—can and must be the main driver in creating green jobs. The scale of the transition to cleaner, lower-carbon energy sources is simply too large for public-sector resources and programmes to tackle alone. Only by a tidal wave of private investment, innovation, invention and entrepreneurship can get the job done.
But that wave will never rise unless the government becomes a constructive partner in the effort. Therefore, it is perfectly sensible for national governments to aspire to create policies that produce green jobs.
After all, John Doerr, a leading light of Silicon Valley who knows a thing or two about innovation and technology, having placed early bets on Sun Microsystems and a little company called Google, has gone so far as to call clean energy "the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century".
The benefits of moving toward clean energy are potentially sweeping(a.广泛的，凶猛的): helping to restore infrastructure, rebuild neighbourhoods, retool factories and ignite innovation. Additionally, energy security, climate stabilization, pollution reduction and expanded economic opportunity are all legitimate aims for policymakers to pursue.
Critics of green jobs recoil（GRE：v （因害怕或厌恶而）退却，退缩）at the notion that governments might somehow tamper(GRE: v. 干预)with the natural energy market to promote renewables. They sniff and generate a host of objections to market-distorting mandates(n.命令) and wasteful subsidies. But energy markets are already the product of policy, mainly those that support incumbent （GRE：adj 有义务的；在职的）energy sources like coal, oil and nuclear power. These incumbent technologies benefit from subsidies, regulatory structures that shut out distributed generation of renewable power and pricing schemes that undervalue the economic contributions of energy efficiency.
The critics conveniently ignore the truth that all forms of energy are heavily regulated and often subsidised. This is because energy is the lifeblood of the economy. The precise mix of energy sources being developed and deployed （GRE：v.部署）within a country is never the result of pure market forces, but always a result of both private and public choices. It reflects a mix of innovation and investment on the one side, and of regulation, taxation and subsidy on the other.
Because we place no value on our atmosphere, the market acting alone cannot achieve the public interest in a stable climate and human health. Therefore, the question is not whether we will pursue policies to shape energy markets, but what sort of energy markets we want to achieve. It is sensible for governments to enact policies that will maximize the use of clean, renewable and low-carbon energy sources within and beyond their borders.
Public policies are now necessary to correct existing market failures and put clean energy on an even playing field with fossil fuels; to establish the market certainty that businesses need to make long-term investment decisions; and to provide stable, long-term support for clean-energy research, development and deployment, just as they have done in the past for the medical, aeronautical and information technology sectors.
Public investment is also required to bring the ageing electrical and transportation infrastructure that powers（v.给。。。提供动力）
Furthermore, governments will need to go beyond a simple cap-and-trade system for global warming pollution. Renewable energy standards and codes for energy efficiency will help build markets. Green banks and new financing tools will use public underwriting（n.保险业） to help unleash（GRE：v.解开，释放） private capital. And public investments in infrastructure will create a platform for innovative businesses to thrive and hire more workers.
In this context, policy is not a restraint on trade. It is a driver of innovation.
Fortunately, this approach has a proud and successful history. We can look to the history of the United States for good examples of what is possible. From the Tennessee Valley Authority and rural electrification, to the interstate highway system, to the telecom revolution, new investments in transformative infrastructure have consistently opened up access and opportunity, and brought more people into the middle class. The internet didn't just create jobs for software engineers; it created work installing fibre optic cable. It created new office jobs in information technology and new career ladders into skilled professions.
Given this aspect of American history, it is ironic that the United States is falling behind in the global race for clean energy. Doubly so, given that the United States invented many of the key technologies that will power future growth, from solar panels, to advanced lithium （n.锂）ion batteries, to the modern wind turbine.
America's economic competitors in Asia and Europe see the opportunity and are driving hard to secure competitive advantage. China by some estimates invested $400 billion of public and private capital in clean energy just last year.
Given the global competition to dominate clean energy production, one need not believe that green jobs are a panacea to believe that pursuing them is smart and sensible.
After all, practically everything that is good for energy independence or the environment will create a job—a green job. Solar panels don't put themselves up. Wind turbines don't manufacture themselves. Homes don't retrofit（v.改进） or upgrade themselves. The smart grid won't install itself, nor will bullet trains lay their own tracks. In many places, trees don't even plant themselves any more.
To argue against green jobs is to argue for government inaction or abdication (n. 退位，辞职)on some of the biggest challenges of our time. That is not acceptable.
Great and mighty labours are required of humanity in the new century. To mitigate climate chaos and avoid economy-wrecking energy shortages, workers must repower, rewire and retrofit whole nations. As men and women step forward to achieve these ends and accomplish these tasks, their hard-hats (n.安全帽)—in many cases—will be green.
The opposition's opening remarks
Governments should not try to choose technological winners and losers and so they should not promote "green" (or "red" or "purple") jobs. Instead, we should leave that to the marketplace. Here's why.
No clear definition of "green"
While the phrase "green jobs" evokes organic farmers and wind turbine repairmen, there is no clear, common definition of what a "green" job is. Without one, special-interest lobbying will transform even well-intentioned programmes. Consider corn-based ethanol, a technology with no redeeming（a.补偿的） features. Corn-based ethanol is bad for the environment, placing unsustainable demands on water supplies and increasing harmful farming practices. It is bad for people, raising corn prices for some of the world's poorest people. It provides little, if any, environmental benefit, with a net energy gain often close to or even below zero (the exact amount depends on the weather during the growing season, among other things). Yet corn-based ethanol has received billions in taxpayer support and continues to be favoured in so-called "green" energy legislation.
The ethanol problem is no accident. Such programmes draw special interests as picnics draw ants. Beneficiaries of federal largesse, such as Archers Daniels Midland, lobby to divert public money for their benefit while Iowa corn interests ensure that presidential candidates pledge fealty(GRE: n.效忠) to ethanol before the Iowa caucuses. This support comes at a high price for ordinary Americans: a Cato Institute study found that every dollar of ADM's ethanol profits costs taxpayers $30. Despite these problems, federal policy has promoted ethanol as a "green" technology for years. Many environmentalists now disclaim corn-based ethanol but, because it has been promoted as an example of the federal government's ability to pick green technology, they bear the burden of showing why their current proposals will not yield the same results. Before we can be sure that a "green" jobs proposal is going to improve environmental quality, we need to know how those promoting it plan to avoid the problem of politics diverting public resources into corporate welfare.
There are also deep disagreements over definitions that need to be settled in order to have a rational allocation of public resources. For example, is nuclear power "green"? If you care about greenhouse gas emissions, it is one of the best technologies available for power generation. If you worry about the long-term disposal of radioactive waste, it isn't. Which concern is more important? Who decides? Green jobs proponents are all over the map on this. The Obama administration is currently promoting certain nuclear subsidies as a "green" investment; the US Conference of Mayors counts existing nuclear facilities as "green" but not new ones; most environmental groups do not consider nuclear power "green" at all. These questions are not just theoretical.
Proponents want to allocate billions in public resources based on someone's categorisation of some things as "green" and some as not. The most basic principles of transparency in government, a theme in Barack Obama's campaign for president, require that we settle such issues before we turn over the keys to the Treasury.
Proponents haven't done their homework
Physicians follow a principle of "First, do no harm". Governments would do well to follow the same. Before governments act on the scale that green jobs proponents propose, we need evidence that the action at least won't hurt the economy. I'd give an "F" mark to all of the major studies supporting green jobs programmes if a student turned them in for an undergraduate economics class. They do not conform to the basic principles of policy analysis.
First, virtually none of the analyses supporting green jobs programmes make calculations of net jobs. Shifting power generation from coal to solar undoubtedly boosts employment in solar energy but it also reduces employment in coal industries. Since solar power is more costly than coal power, the increase in energy prices wipes out jobs in other industries. If their employment effects are a reason to support these programmes, we need to know that the expenditures will actually create more new jobs than they destroy.
Second, most proponents use a technique called input-output analysis. This technique requires three assumptions: (1) constant factor prices; (2) constant coefficients production; and (3) a jobs multiplier greater than one. Neither of the first two applies to disruptive technological changes like shifting the mix of energy production and radically changing energy prices. There is almost no evidence to support the third and many reasons to doubt its validity. I have written at length elsewhere about these methodological flaws, but the point is essentially "garbage in, garbage out". We cannot trust the estimates of the benefits because they were done incorrectly. Just as you would not make an investment based on the calculations of an accountant who cannot add, we should not spend billions of dollars based on economic predictions from forecasters who do not know their craft or practise it with sleights of hand.
Let the market decide
We know how to improve energy efficiency, develop new technologies and create new jobs: unleash entrepreneurs and take advantage of markets to solve what the Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek called "the knowledge problem". Put simply, Hayek's point, on this issue, is that we do not know enough to plan on the grand scale green jobs that proponents propose.
Consider energy. In 1870, coal heated people's homes, natural gas provided light, electricity had little practical application and gasoline was a waste product from kerosene（n.煤油）
refining. The great energy policy debates of that era were concerned with whether the world would run short of coal. No one in 1870 would have predicted that coal would become almost entirely an industrial fuel in plentiful supply, that natural gas would be used primarily to generate electricity and provide residential heat, that electricity would be in widespread use in homes and industry, or that gasoline would become an expensive commodity. We know as little about our energy future as our predecessors did about theirs and so we must put a premium（n.奖金） on strategies that can adapt to new information, circumstances and ideas. That is what entrepreneurs do best. We should let them do it.
Audience participation
Featured guest
Robert N. Stavins
In the January 12th 2009 issue of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote an article called "Greening the Ghetto: Can a Remedy Serve for Both Global Warming and Poverty?" The following passage appeared in the article:
When I presented [Van] Jones's arguments to Robert Stavins, a professor of business and government at Harvard who studies the economics of environmental regulation, he offered 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.
That brief quote generated a considerable amount of commentary on the internet, much of it negative and some of it downright hostile. This surprised me, because I didn't consider the proposition（n.论点，主张） to be controversial, and I had chosen my words carefully, simply stating that "it is not always best to try to address two challenges with … a single policy instrument". Two activities, each with a sensible purpose, can be very effective if done separately, but sometimes combining them means that one does a poor job with one, the other, or even both.
In the policy world, such dual-purpose policy instruments are sometimes a good, even great idea (gasoline/petrol taxes are an example), but other times, they are not. Whether trying to kill two birds with one stone makes sense depends upon the proximity of the birds, the weapon being used and the accuracy of the stoner. In the real world of important policy challenges, such as environmental degradation and economic recession, these are empirical questions and need to be examined case by case, which was my point in the brief quote above.
In 1990, when the US Congress sought to cut sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions from coal-fired power plants by 50% to reduce acid rain, Senator Robert Byrd (West Virginia) argued against the proposal for a national cap-and-trade system, because it would displace Appalachian coal-mining jobs through reduced demand for high-sulphur coal. He recommended instead a national requirement for all plants to install scrubbers（n.an apparatus for removing impurities）, which would have increased costs nationally by $1 billion per year in perpetuity.
Fortunately, the late Senator Ted Kennedy (Massachusetts) recognised that these two problems (acid rain and displaced miners) called for two separate policy instruments. Simultaneous with the passage of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, which established the path-breaking SO2 allowance trading programme, Congress passed a job training and compensation initiative for Appalachian coal miners, at a one-time cost of $250 million. Acid rain was cut by 50%, $1 billion per year in perpetuity(n,永久) was saved for the economy, and sensible and meaningful aid was provided to the displaced miners. Two different policies were used to address two different purposes. Sometimes that is the wisest course.
What about two current challenges: concern about the environment, in particular global climate change, on the one hand, and the need to revitalise economies, on the other hand? Can "green jobs" be the answer to both?
Will economic stimulus packages, properly designed, lead to job creation in the short term? Yes, but to some degree this will be by moving forward in time the date of job creation, as opposed to creating additional jobs in the long run. Of course, at a time of recession and high unemployment, that can be a sensible thing to do. So, by expanding economic activity, an economic stimulus package can surely create jobs, green or otherwise, in the short term.
But will a stimulus package, such as subsidies for renewable energy, create net jobs from the change in the nature of economic activity? The key question here is whether the encouraged economic activities in green sectors are more labour-intensive than the discouraged economic activities in other sectors, such as with a shift to renewables from fossil fuels.
This is considerably less clear, but there are cases where it is likely to be valid. Solar rooftop installation, for example, is labour-intensive. And the greatest consistency between economic stimulus and greening the economy is within the energy-efficiency realm, in particular, activities such as the weatherisation of homes and businesses (President Obama's cash-for-caulkers initiative comes to mind). Such projects are highly labour-intensive, can be done relatively quickly and will save energy. (Note, however, that the US Department of Energy is having considerable trouble spending the stimulus money fast enough.) And, importantly, they will reduce the long-term cost of meeting climate objectives.
But some other areas, such as new green infrastructure, will happen much more slowly, partly because of NIMBY ("not in my backyard") problems, and so are much less consistent with the purpose of economic stimulus. An example of the challenge is presented by the current interest in expanding and improving the US electricity grid.
A more interlinked and better grid is needed for increased reliance on renewable energy sources, which will be needed to address climate change. First, greater use of renewable resources will require an expanded grid just to transmit electricity from wind-power sources in the Great Plains, for example, to cities with high demand for power. And, second, this will also require the use of a so-called "smart grid", so that greater reliance on intermittent（GRE: a.间歇的） sources of electricity, such as from wind farms, can be balanced with cuts in consumer demand when power is scarce.
But the timing of grid expansion, important for the use of renewables and achieving climate goals, is not coincident with the appropriate timing of the economic stimulus. As was reported in an article last year in the New York Times ("Hurdles (Not Financial Ones) Await Electric Grid Update," January 7th 2009, p. A11), the CEO of the American Transmission Company, which operates in four midwestern states, said that the firm's most recent major project, a 200-mile transmission line from Minnesota to Wisconsin, took two years to build, but eight years prior to that to win the necessary permits.
Likewise, an article by Peter Behr in Climate Wire ("Green Power Express line gets derailed（a.出轨的） by patchwork grid rules", February 12th 2009, p. 1) focused on the dilemma facing ITC Holdings, the nation's largest independent electric transmission company, which has been seeking permission from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to build a line to bring wind power from the Great Plains to the Midwest and East. The company's chairman and CEO, Joseph Welch, indicated that a greater hurdle than the necessary money or "even the ever-present citizen opposition to new transmission projects" is a set of rules for interstate transmission lines that effectively prohibits projects that are not immediately required to maintain the grid's reliability. A project intended to provide future green power does not meet the test.
These are just two examples of the unpleasant reality of the pace of investment and change in this important category of green infrastructure frequently talked about in the context of quick economic stimulus. Surely, economic recovery, increased reliance on renewable sources of energy and a smarter, interconnected grid are all important. But that does not mean they are best addressed with a single policy instrument: the economic stimulus package.
So, the strongest support for green job creation is with regard to economic expansion, as opposed to changes in the economy (which is why China is able to "green its economy" as it rapidly expands). Of course, the key economic question remains whether even more jobs would be created with a different sort of expansion. In any event, while we seek to expand economic activity through economic stimulus, it can make sense to try to reduce any tendency to lock in new capital stock that would make it more difficult and costly to achieve long-term environmental goals. But that is very different from claiming that all substitution of green activities for brown activities creates jobs in the long term.
As governments use economic stimulus to expand economic activity, they can and should tilt（GRE：v.倾斜） the expansion in a green direction. But rather than a "broad-brush green painting of the stimulus", this may call for some careful, selective, and well thought through "green tinting（v.着色）".
Addressing the worst economic recession in generations calls for the most effective economic stimulus that can be devised, not some stimulus that is diminished in effectiveness through excessive bells and whistles meant to address a myriad of other (legitimate) social concerns. And, likewise, getting serious about global climate change will require the enactment and implementation of meaningful, dedicated climate policies. These are two serious but different policy problems, and they call for two serious, carefully crafted（v.手工制作） policy responses.
REBUTTAL
The moderator's rebuttal remarks
Mar 12th 2010 | Oliver Morton
The two sides are clearly agreed on the fact that the private sector will be responsible for actually producing jobs, green or otherwise. What they differ on is the extent to which government should, by means of policies intended to provide environmental benefit, seek to shape the decisions that surround that job creation. In the helpful metaphor introduced by Robert Stavins, those who want to hit two birds with one stone need to show that the birds are close together, and that their stone throwing skills are up to the task. (Demonstrating that there are no nearby glasshouses at risk might also be a help …)
Van Jones makes the undeniable point that within the energy sector there is no question of green jobs policy distorting an otherwise free market; the market starts off hugely influenced, perhaps compromised, by legacy subsidies and other interventions of all sorts. He also points to studies saying that investment in various green technologies and industries produces more employment than investment in those subsidised hydrocarbons, though it is not obviously the case that investment would come at the expense only of fossil-fuel investment. (On this issue of opportunity costs, if either side would care to look a little further at the study of Spanish green jobs by researchers at King Juan Carlos University, it seems to me that many of the commenters would be grateful.)
Mr Jones might give further attention, though, to the implicit message of the existing distorting subsidies, a message brought up by commenter Kenavi: they show how long such incentives can outlive（v.经受住） their useful purpose, if they ever had one, and warn that green job policies may do the same. Both Andy Morriss and Mr Jones agree that jobs created by American ethanol policy are not very green. It seems to me that Mr Jones needs to address the question of how future green jobs interventions （GRE：n.干涉）that prove un-green might be dealt with, in the face of the political truth that the green failures of ethanol policy have not been.
Mr Morriss is inclined to limit his shaping of the market response to offering prizes for certain types of innovation deemed necessary. In the comments MapJim stresses, rightly I think, the need for basic research as a government priority beyond such technological demonstration. But Mr Morriss's belief in innovation and markets alone seems to stretch too far in some respects. To bolster his arguments that governments cannot pick winners, he points to the very different energy economy of the 1870s, and suggests that people today can no more guess at their energy futures than people back then could have guessed at the realities of today.
This seems implausible. Today's scientific understanding of the earth and its resources, and of the nature of the physical world, is genuinely and qualitatively, as well as quantitatively, more advanced than that of the 1870s, when educated analysts were only beginning to get to grips（n. 理解） with the laws of thermodynamics. Forecasters today cannot be sure of future technology costs, but they can be fairly sure that they have thought of them in a way that the people of the 1870s had not thought of mass motorized transport, nuclear power or domestic electricity services. On the scales of cosmology and string theory, physics certainly still has revolutions to offer. When it comes to practical matters of energy generation and supply, surprises as huge as those that followed from the understanding of the atom are surely unlikely. Innovation, including that provided by novel scientific insights garnered（GRE：v.收集） through fresh research, is vital to the improvement and evolution of technologies, and some technologies—including perhaps those behind biofuels—may change a lot.
But the idea that there can be no picking of winners because not all the horses have yet reached the track seems to take historical relativism too far. The next decades of energy and climate policy will be largely about deploying（GRE: v,部署）, sometimes in improved forms, technologies and strategies already reasonably well known. It does not seem a priori unreasonable for governments to make some choices between those options on the basis of externalities not captured by the market.
The proposer's rebuttal remarks
Mar 12th 2010 | Van Jones
In a world of precarious（GRE: a,.不确定的，不安全的） energy supplies, mounting climate concerns and a global race for clean-energy jobs, Andy Morriss suggests that Americans should sit back and leave our energy security solely to the magic of the marketplace.
I share Mr Morriss's preference for market-based solutions, but in this case his prescription is not rooted in the reality of today's distorted and dysfunctional energy markets. He claims that the marketplace is best at pricing energy and picking technologies, but that is simply not so when the market is so heavily tilted in favour of fossil fuels.
Nor do today's energy markets allow us to respond effectively to the critical challenge of our time: global warming. Our energy troubles arise from a whole series of government policy failures and staggering market failures. We simply cannot rely solely on the market to fix our problems without first taking steps to repair our markets.
To build support for his position, Mr Morriss raises a series of concerns. Most of them miss the mark. I share in Mr Morriss's critique of corn-based ethanol, for example, but I would reject the implication that we should therefore just accept the status quo and avoid future missteps by never again trying to diversify our energy supply.
Mr Morriss claims that the work of moving to a cleaner economy is hampered by the lack of a universal and timeless definition of the term "green jobs". This is a red herring. In public policy, we continually debate, revisit and reshape what should be included under any important label, whether the term is "American made", "organic food" or "green jobs". In a democracy, these kinds of debates are continuous and any resolution only provisional.
What is important is that, in practice, governments and businesses today, at all levels, are crafting definitions and versions of the term "green jobs", definitions that correspond to their own specific challenges, needs, preferences and opportunities. And they are moving forward, on that basis, to create the jobs of tomorrow.
Mr Morriss claims that "virtually none of the analyses supporting green jobs programs make calculations of net jobs". Not true. Many studies show green investments resulting in a net increase in jobs.
Similarly, data culled(v.摘选) from the US Department of Commerce suggest that money invested in efficiency and renewable energy produces roughly four times as many jobs as the same dollar amount invested in producing energy from oil. Clean-energy investments produce roughly three times the number of jobs as investing in coal. There are simply more jobs per dollar and per kilowatt hour in producing clean energy and rebuilding for efficiency than there are in producing dirty energy and wasting energy.
A more diverse energy supply would reduce price volatility（n.动荡不定） and blunt our nation's vulnerability to fossil-fuel price shocks. Fluctuating energy prices can stunt(v.阻碍正常生长) economic growth, costing a country jobs.
Over time, countries with policies that limit carbon emissions and promote clean energy will likely generate more patents in clean energy and more intellectual property, further underscoring the importance of proactive policy to ensure long-term competitiveness.
Mr Morriss jokes that he would give an F grade to a college freshman who authored some green jobs reports. And yet his own analysis ignores the Econ 101 matter of externalities and market failures, making no mention of (nor offering any solution for) the fact that dirty energy offloads（v. To unload ）pain and costs on to innocent third parties, now and into the future.
Mr Morriss also implies that inaction is costless. The majority of 144 economists polled by New York University's Institute for Policy Integrity, or 84%, agree that global warming's effects "create significant risks" to the economy, and 94% agree that the United States should join climate agreements to limit global warming.
Mr Morriss claims to be opposed to picking winners. But he apparently has no compunction about guaranteeing losers. Unless we act boldly, our present course will lead to disaster, not just ecologically but also economically.
So to avoid inevitable shortages of dirty energy and inevitable surpluses of carbon pollution, humanity must get off the present path. Governments helped lay the tracks toward this looming disaster. Governments can now throw the switch to point us in a more sustainable direction. Only then can the genius and dynamism(n.活力，推动力)of private capital power us toward a better future.
The opposition's rebuttal remarks
Mar 12th 2010 | Andrew P. Morriss
Van Jones and I agree that "the private sector, not the government, can and must be the main driver in creating green jobs". We agree that government subsidies for coal, oil and nuclear power are a serious problem. We interpret that agreed baseline in quite different ways, however.
Mr Jones sees subsidies as inevitable: it is a "truth" that "all forms of energy are heavily regulated and subsidised". Rather than get rid of wasteful subsidies that transfer money from consumers to special interests in fossil fuels, his solution is to give others their chance at the trough（n.水槽；低谷）. And that has what has happened. Far from leveling the playing field, these new subsidiesdwarf(GRE: v 变小) the old ones: solar and wind receive subsidies of over $23/Mwh compared with the $0.44/Mwh for conventional coal and $0.25/Mwh for natural gas.
He may be right about the politics—Republicans and Democrats quickly lose their zeal for ending the special interest subsidies and tax breaks they campaigned against once they get elected—but he couldn't be more wrong on the merits. That the [name your villain] industry was successful at getting subsidies in the past does not mean we should give subsidies to others today, it means we should stop all the subsidies.
Public choice theory identified a key insight about government in the 1960s and subsequent work has repeatedly demonstrated its truth. Concentrated, organised interest groups (oil companies, solar power companies, etc get benefits from governments at the expense of diverse, dispersed groups (the general public). Special interests have the advantage because the benefits received are concentrated and valuable enough to make hiring lawyers and lobbyists to manipulate the legislative and regulatory processes worthwhile. The general public, on the other hand, loses too little on each subsidy to motive a lobbying trip to Washington. As I noted in my opening, we see this in Mr Jones' field of alternative energy: the wasteful, environmentally damaging corn-based ethanol programme now deeply entrenched in （strongly established and not likely to change）our regulatory system is the result of the 1990s versions of the arguments for green energy Mr Jones makes now.
Mr Jones and I agree that the key to our energy future is innovation. We disagree about the role of the government in fostering innovation. Ironically, Mr Jones's examples of successful federal spurs（GRE:n.刺激物，激励） to innovation involve considerable environmental degradation. For example, he points to the interstate highway system, which is usually classified as a subsidy to the oil industry by alternative energy proponents since it facilitated the dramatic growth of the car industry after the second world war and helped Americans move from cities to the suburbs green advocates routinely criticise. Even more amazingly, he cites the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the most environmentally damaging federal programmes ever created and one repeatedly charged with violating the environmental justice norms for which Mr Jones is famous.
There are examples of government programmes that foster innovation without political manipulation. Our patent laws make intellectual property rights accessible to ordinary people and helped transform the United States from a rural backwater on the margins of the world economy in 1800 to the leading industrial power in 1900. Zorina Khan's The Democratization of Invention (Cambridge University Press, 2005) details how much more widespread inventive activity was among Americans than it was among Europeans during the 19th century. Allowing inventors to reap the rewards of innovation unleashes（GRE: v.解开，解放） the wave of human creativity which Mr Jones and I agree must be the source of the means of meeting our society's energy needs.
We do not live in a world where wise and benevolent public officials thoughtfully allocate resources to benefit the public at large. We live in the real world. Special interests mobilise armies of lobbyists and lawyers, deploy rivers of campaign favours for politicians and bureaucrats, in pursuit of a chance to feed from the public trough. James Madison said it best in Federalist 51, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." We must take into account the imperfections（n.不完美）
of human institutions and knowledge. Political frailties（GRE:n弱点） dictate that we disclaim the power Mr Jones seeks to mobilise and instead build institutions resistant to the disease of self-interest. Dictating our energy future from Washington, DC flunks（GRE: n /v 使考试不及格） that test.
Featured guest
Daniel J. Weiss
Pundits and pollsters bombard（GRE: v痛斥） beltway denizens daily, begging for bipartisanship（n两党合作）. President Obama and Senator Graham, the one a progressive and the other a staunch （a.坚定地）conservative, demonstrate that there is great bipartisan potential to solve immediate and long-term economic problems via investments in clean energy programmes and pricing the cost of carbon pollution. These measures would create jobs, enhance economic competitiveness, increase US energy independence and improve our national security.
By 2020, clean energy "will be the 3rd industrial sector in the world". And while the Senate ponders（v思索） its options, other nations are already seizing this economic opportunity. China boasts the most installed renewable electricity capacity. Germany has 20% more employees in renewable energy than in conventional energy. Spain's investment in energy efficiency reduced its energy intensity (energy consumption per unit of GDP) by 11% in just four years.
These and other nations understand that the transformation to a low-carbon economy has strategic benefits, including broad-based economic prosperity and energy security.
A clean energy economic transformation is one of President Obama's top domestic priorities. He believes that our immediate economic recovery and sustained job creation in the 21st century depend on it. The green jobs that result from investments in clean energy programmes are typically in existing fields, such as plumbing, construction, manufacturing and sales. These are clean energy jobs because they would either increase energy efficiency or help build or install renewable energy technologies such as wind turbines, solar panels or geothermal heat pumps.
To complement these efforts, Senator Graham and Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) are developing "business-friendly climate legislation" that would put a declining limit on carbon air pollution. This would make dirty coal-fired electricity more expensive and drive investment toward cleaner alternatives, including natural gas, efficiency, and wind and solar power.
The US Climate Action Partnership, which includes Duke Energy, Dow Chemical, Honeywell International and other major corporations, also supports this approach. They believe that long-term innovation and growth require clean-energy investments and reductions in carbon pollution. The business alliance notes that "by putting a price on carbon, the United States can spark（v.触发，引发）
major investments in new technologies … action on climate will strengthen the US economy and generate meaningful employment for Americans".
General Electric, another member of the partnership, warned senators that inaction would harm businesses and the economy. "Policy uncertainty not only inhibits growth, it causes disinvestment," says the company. "Not acting … sends a signal to industry—one that may have economic ramifications(GRE: n分支) for a generation."
Independent assessments confirm that clean-energy jobs and pollution reduction legislation would expand employment. An analysis by Yale University, University of California-Berkeley and University of Illinois determined that the American Clean Energy and Security Act, passed by the House of Representatives in 2009, would create nearly 2m jobs by 2020. Another study by the University of Massachusetts projects that the legislation passed by the House combined with the Recovery Act spending would generate a net 1.7m jobs.
Two former senior Spanish government officials debunked（GRE：v揭露）
these bogus（GRE：a 虚假的） findings. They determined that the study "fails to meet even the minimum standards of academic integrity … Official figures from the Spanish Ministry of Labor prove that the sector of renewable energies has created 175,000 jobs." The New York Times reports that despite some initial missteps, the Spanish investments generally "fulfilled their promise".
The US National Renewable Energy Lab also reviewed this study, and found that "the primary conclusion … policy support of renewable energy results in net jobs losses—is not supported by their work".
Americans certainly understand the stakes. Recent polls found that clean-energy investments and global warming action have strong public support. A January survey by Republican pollster Frank Luntz determined that an overwhelming majority of respondents agreed that "we must take this opportunity to use the emerging new energy economy to create jobs and careers right here in America, not overseas".
A 2010 poll of swing states by Joel Benenson, President Obama's 2008 pollster, found nearly three-fifths of respondents would support an "energy bill that limits pollution and greenhouse gas emissions through what's been called a Cap and Trade plan and also invests in clean, renewable energy sources in America". This includes a majority of independents and nearly 40% of Republicans.
President Obama rightly argues that "we can let the jobs of tomorrow be created abroad, or we can create those jobs right here in America and lay the foundation for lasting prosperity". He has planted the seeds for this prosperity, but to harvest sustainable long-term economic growth and broad-based prosperity through robust（GRE: a 强壮的，健康的）job creation, the Senate must adopt comprehensive, bipartisan legislation. With leadership from Senators Graham, Kerry and Lieberman, there is an unprecedented opportunity for bipartisan cooperation in the Senate for comprehensive clean-energy legislation that would boost investments to create the jobs of tomorrow.
But the Senate must act now to keep pace with our economic rivals, expand employment opportunities, enhance American energy independence and improve our national security.
THE CLOSING
The moderator's closing remarks
Mar 17th 2010 | Oliver Morton
It has been an interesting debate, and a slightly surprising one, at least to me, in that the votes have moved in a quite different way from the comments. I haven't done a numerical tally(n数字计分), and some comments are nuanced（a.细微差别的）, or gnomic（GRE: a 精辟的）, enough to defy categorization (I particularly appreciated Suleymanovic's "I think this is wrong, but it may be correct"). But my impression is that the comments from the floor have tended to go Andrew Morriss's way. The votes, though, tell a different story, with a pretty good majority for Mr Morriss turning over the first few days into an even better majority for Mr Jones, and from then on pretty much refusing to budge. You still, though, have a chance to change that, should you wish to.
The debate has not moved on particularly far from its opening, with the parties looking for different, more telling reiterations (n反复，重说)of their positions rather than taking them in new directions. A difference in emphasis, though, was introduced by Dan Weiss's comments, which put the job creation that can be ascribed to green policies into the context of American competitiveness, a frame very popular at the moment with those trying to move climate legislation through the American Senate.
This approach—crudely put, the idea that green jobs are a finite resource, and that America is being outrun（v超过，比。。。更快） in the race to get as many of them as possible by China, which intends to dominate this part of the economy—adds a new element of fear and urgency to a side of the debate which otherwise has a win–win feel. Commenter Ellis Lee gave the point resonance（GRE: n共鸣） by pointing to the greenery with which some Chinese companies are now trying to endow their skyscrapers. That said, the idea of competing for green jobs rather hides the more important difference between the two countries in this regard. Those skyscrapers are a reminder that China has a robustly growing economy, on the basis of which green job creation, like job creation of all sorts, will be considerably easier.
Another commenter, SonofBaraka, makes the interesting point that while government commitment to green jobs means some level of interference in the market, it might in the end reduce that interference by moving more and more people off grid and into self-sufficiency, obviating the need for much of the paraphernalia（n随身物品） of regulations. This is not perhaps a compelling argument, but it did strike me as a fresh one in this context.
In its image of regulation withering away（幻灭，枯萎） it would certainly not compel Mr Morriss, who has continued to make strong points about the enduring and often baleful legacy of past intervention. The distortion and subsidy endemic（GRE: a地方性的） in the energy sector, which green-jobs advocates seek to shift to fit their agenda, have a history. That history is one of earlier policy entrepreneurs attempting to adapt the sector to their own needs, and special interests capturing those attempts. The inductive（a.归纳的） argument that what happened then, again and again, will happen now is not conclusive: induction never is, because things do change. But it is definitely powerful.
At the same time, Mr Jones has returned to the point that there is a separate, and prior, need to change the energy sector in response to fears about climate change, among other things. Given that this has to happen, and that the market will not bring it about unaided, seeking at the margins to increase employment as it does seems a no-brainer (which is not to say that the point's elaboration is not thoughtful). At the moment, he seems to be commanding your assent. And he might well have done so if the motion had been more precisely formulated, perhaps along the admirably clear-thinking lines that commenter KTehJE94S7 suggests: "It is desirable that governments adjust the policy environment in such a way such that jobs which consume fewer natural resources than they produce increase in number."
NEW DEBATE
This house believes that GDP growth is a poor measure of improving living standards.
About this debate
When economists want to compare living standards in one country with those in another, or to track how much richer a country has become over time, they usually look at gross domestic product (GDP). The growth of GDP, adjusted for changes in population and prices, is the commonest measure of changes in living standards. But is it a good one?
GDP was designed to estimate the value of goods and services produced in a country. Critics say that as a measure of living standards it misses out too much, such as the state of the environment, people's health, leisure and the distribution of income. Does a rising GDP mean that people are happier as well as richer? Is it time, as a Nobel economics laureate(n.得奖人)has said, for an end to "GDP fetishism（n.盲目崇拜）"? Or is GDP, for all its flaws, a good enough estimate of society's material well-being? Should GDP be ditched（GRE：n 沟渠；壕沟v 丢弃）, or is the search for better measures a fool's errand（GRE：n 差事）?
Economics focus
Measuring what matters
Man does not live by GDP alone. A new report urges statisticians to capture what people do live by
Sep 17th 2009 | From The Economist print edition
Illustration by Jac Depczyk
HOW well off are Americans? Frenchmen? Indians? Ghanaians? An economist’s simplest answer is the gross domestic product, or GDP, per person of each country. To help you compare the figures, he will convert them into dollars, either at market exchange rates or (better) at purchasing-power-parity rates, which allow for the cheapness of, say, haircuts and taxi rides in poorer parts of the world.
To be sure, this will give you a fair guide to material standards of living: the Americans and the French, on average, are much richer than Indians and Ghanaians. But you may suspect, and the economist should know, that this is not the whole truth. America’s GDP per head is higher than France’s, but the French spend less time at work, so are they really worse off? An Indian may be desperately poor and yet say he is happy; an American may be well fed yet fed up. GDP was designed to measure only the value of goods and services produced in a country, and it does not even do that precisely. How well off people feel also depends on things GDP does not capture, such as their health or whether they have a job. Environmentalists have long complained that GDP treats the despoliation（n.抢劫，掠夺） of the planet as a plus (via the resulting economic output) rather than a minus (forests destroyed).
In recent years economists have therefore been looking at other measures of well-being—even “happiness”, a notion that it once seemed absurd to quantify. Among those convinced that official statisticians should join in is Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president. On September 14th a commission he appointed last year, comprising 25 prominent social scientists, five with Nobel prizes in economics, presented its findings*. Joseph Stiglitz, the group’s chairman and one of the laureates, said the 292-page report was a call to abandon “GDP fetishism”. France’s national statistics agency, Mr Sarkozy declared, should broaden its purview（GRE：n范围）.
The commission divided its work into three parts. The first deals with familiar criticisms of GDP as a measure of well-being. It takes no account of the depreciation of capital goods, and so overstates the value of production. Moreover, the value of production is based on market prices, but not everything has a price. The list of such things includes more than the environment. The worth of services not supplied through markets, such as state health care or education, owner-occupied housing or unpaid child care by parents, is “imputed”—estimated, using often rickety （GRE：a.摇摇晃晃的，不牢固的）assumptions—or left out, even though private health care and schooling, renting and child-minding are directly measured.
The report also argues that official statisticians should concentrate on households’ incomes, consumption and wealth rather than total production. All these adjustments make a difference. In 2005, the commission found, France’s real GDP per person was 73% of America’s. But once government services, household production and leisure are added in, the gap narrows: French households had 87% of the adjusted income of their American counterparts. No wonder Mr Sarkozy is so keen.
Sizing up the good life
Next the commission turns to measures of the “quality of life”. These attempt to capture well-being beyond a mere command of economic resources. One approach quantifies people’s subjective well-being—divided into an overall judgment about their lives (a “ladder of life” score) and moment-by-moment flows of positive and negative feelings. For many years researchers had been spurred（GRE：v 刺激，鞭策） on by an apparent paradox: that rising incomes did not make people happier in the long run. Recent studies suggest, though, that countries with higher GDP per person do tend to have higher ladder-of-life scores. Exactly what, beyond income, affects subjective well-being—from health, marital status and age to perceptions of corruption—is much pored over（钻研）. The unemployed report lower scores, even allowing for their lower incomes. Joblessness hits more than your wallet.
Third, the report examines the well-being of future generations. People alive today will pass on a stock of exhaustible and other natural resources as well as machines, buildings and social institutions. Their children’s human capital (skills and so forth) will depend on investment in education and research today. Economic activity is sustainable if future generations can expect to be at least as well off as today’s. Finding a single measure that captures all this, the report concludes, seems too ambitious. That sounds right. For one thing, statisticians would have to make assumptions about the relative value of, say, the environment and new buildings—not just today, but many years from now. It is probably wiser to look at a wide range of figures.
Some members of the commission believe that the financial crisis and the recession have made a broadening of official statistics more urgent. They think there might have been less euphoria（GRE：n幸福愉快感） had financial markets and policymakers been less fixated on GDP. That seems far-fetched. Stockmarket indices, soaring house prices and low inflation surely did more to feed bankers’ and borrowers’ exaggerated sense of well-being.
Broadening official statistics is a good idea in its own right. Some countries have already started—notably, tiny Bhutan. There are pitfalls, though. The report justifies wider measures of well-being partly by noting that the public must have trust in official statistics. Quite so; which makes it all the more important that the statisticians are independent of government. The thought of grinning（GRE：v露齿笑） politicians telling people how happy they are is truly Orwellian. Another risk is that a proliferation of measures could be a gift to interest groups, letting them pick numbers that amplify their misery in order to demand a bigger share of the national pie. But these are early days. Meanwhile, get measuring.
The moderator's opening remarks
Apr 20th 2010 | Patrick Lane
Finding ways to improve humanity's living standards is the point of economics. Having a good measure of living standards, you may think, is therefore pretty fundamental to the discipline. For decades economists have turned to gross domestic product (GDP) when they want an estimate of how well off people are. By how much are Americans better off than Indians, or than their parents' generation? Chances are the answer will start with GDP.
GDP is really a measure of an economy's output, valued at market prices (to the extent that you have them). As societies produce more, and therefore earn more, their material well-being rises. So it is no surprise that so many economists and official statisticians broadly accept GDP as a measure of living standards.
It isn't the only measure. Even before the recent recession, a lot of debate over American living standards was based not on GDP, which was growing healthily¬, but on median incomes, which were not: the point was that national output was growing, but that its fruits were not being evenly shared. It doesn't cover everything: not all the things that we value are bought and sold in the marketplace. But when economists want to measure the living standards of whole societies, GDP is where they usually start.
That said, economists and statisticians have been debating for years whether GDP measures what truly matters. It may capture material wealth, broadly, but is that enough? If it is not enough, with what should it be replaced—or, more likely, supplemented? With assessments of the environment? Measures of people's health? Estimates of their happiness? And how might all these different aspects be combined? If some new measure is closely correlated with GDP, then GDP, though imperfect, may be good enough. If it is not, then focusing on GDP could be an error of more than just measurement: governments that pursue GDP growth may be making their citizens worse off than they might be.
The Economist's latest online debate is intended to wrestle（v.摔跤；努力解决） with these questions. Andrew Oswald, of the University of Warwick, is proposing the motion that "GDP growth is a poor measure of improving living standards". Opposing him is Steven Landefeld, director of the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which produces America's national income and product accounts, of which GDP is a prominent feature.
Mr Oswald's starting point is a report published last year by a commission chaired by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel economics laureate. The Stiglitz commission (of which Mr Oswald was a member, and which was written about in The Economist last September argued that official statistics should shift away from measuring production to measuring "well-being". Mr Oswald points to two pieces of evidence in particular: the Easterlin Paradox, the finding that increasing wealth does not make countries happier; and global warming, which is a sign that people should produce less and enjoy the planet more.
Mr Landefeld remarks that GDP was not intended to be a comprehensive measure of society's well-being. Even so, he says, it has stood up well as a measure of living standards. Nothing has bettered it yet. That isn't to say that GDP can't be improved, though—and Mr Landefeld points to ways in which the BEA has been trying to bring that about. He too notes the conclusions of Mr Stiglitz's commission.
These promises to be a lively and enjoyable debate on an important subject: how much use is GDP in measuring how well off people are? Mr Oswald and Mr Landefeld have set out what they think. I'm glad that we have two such prominent people to lead the debate. And I'm looking forward to the next round of arguments and to what you, on the floor of our online chamber, have to say.
The proposer's opening remarks
Apr 20th 2010 | Andrew Oswald
"A … key message, and unifying theme of the report, is that the time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people's well-being."
(Executive Summary: Stiglitz Commission Report)
GDP is a gravely dated pursuit. It is time to listen to the Stiglitz Report.
The first reason is the evidence known as the Easterlin Paradox (the empirical finding that countries do not become happier as they grow wealthier). The second reason is that global warming means it is necessary for Homo sapiens to make fewer things rather than more, to travel less except on their feet, to lean on the direct energy of the sun and water rather than on the smashed fuel of buried trees, to value tranquil beauty more and 160mph motor cars less.
I am optimistic. Eventually the green movement will discover the data of the Easterlin Paradox, named after Richard Easterlin, a famous Californian economist, and also become aware of the statistical evidence on declining emotional prosperity that I describe below. Although fine young scholars like Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers doubt the veracity（GRE：n 真实性） of it, they are heavily outnumbered（v数量上超过—）: the weight of published evidence is in line with Mr Easterlin's paradox.
Moreover, Ms Stevenson and Mr Wolfers themselves agree that America, perhaps the iconic（a.图像的，肖像的，图标的） GDP-chasing nation, is not becoming happier through time.
If we look at broader measures of psychological well-being, the newest longitudinal research suggests there are reasons to be more pessimistic than Easterlin. Although further research evidence needs to be collected, this is what we currently know.
Worryingly, emotional prosperity and mental health appear from the latest data to be getting worse through time. This disturbing conclusion emerges from these seven studies:
Why? We are not yet certain. But, first, humans are animals of comparison (some of the newest evidence, from brain scans, is reported in Fliessbach et al., 2007). What I want subconsciously is to have three zoomy BMWs and for my colleagues in the office corridor at work to have mere rusting, spluttering（v 发出杂音，杂乱而仓促地说） Fords. Unfortunately, the tide of economic growth lifts all boats, so where having three glamorous cars was unusual, eventually it becomes the norm, and any relative gains are thereby neutralised. Second, people choose things—such as high-pressure kinds of work and long commutes away from their families and their dogs and their fishing buddies—that, despite what they think, will often not make them happier. Economists have ignored the research on "affective forecasting mistakes" by psychologists like Daniel Gilbert; they need to wake up to it.
Unsurprisingly, the citizens of the rich nations find it difficult to grasp that higher gross domestic product from this point onwards will not make society happier. Like people in earlier times who could not conceive of themselves as creatures glued by gravity onto a spherical planet, they trust their intuitions (because as individuals they like to become richer and assume whole countries must be the same). One cannot blame them. But the evidence shows they are wrong.
As an undergraduate, I was taught that economics is a social science concerned with the efficient allocation of scarce resources. In 2010, a better definition is needed. Economics is a social science concerned with the way to allocate plentiful resources to maximise a society's emotional prosperity and mental health.
A gravely dated pursuit.
The opposition's opening remarks
Apr 20th 2010 | Steve Landefeld
Gross domestic product (GDP) is a key measure of a country's economic activity—the purpose for which it was designed. It was not designed to be, nor should be regarded as, a comprehensive measure of society's well-being. Nonetheless, it has also proven useful as a gauge of an economy's capacity to improve living standards. It was a catastrophic decline in living standards that prompted the development of national, or GDP, accounts. Trying to design policies in the 1930s to combat the Great Depression, President Roosevelt had only such sketchy（GRE：a粗略的） data as stock prices, freight car loadings and incomplete indices of industrial production on which to rely. In response, the US Department of Commerce developed a set of national economic accounts that for the first time provided a comprehensive framework to guide policy decisions to assist the millions of people who were out of work.
GDP, and the broader set of national income, product and wealth accounts, has stood the test time and no other measure has proven a worthy alternative. Simon Kuznets, one of the early architects of the accounts, in 1941 recognised the limitations of focusing on market activities and excluding household production and a broad range of other non-market activities and assets that have productive value or yield satisfaction. Yet 75 years and lots of research later, there is no broader social measurement tool that officials would agree is valid and useful.
It would, therefore, seem irresponsible to abandon the most comprehensive and reliable system currently available to tell us how a society is faring economically. GDP may not be a complete measure of improving living standards, but that does not make it a poor one, especially when considering what could possibly replace it today.
There is, of course, room to improve GDP through better measuring of the distribution of the gains from economic growth and the sustainability of that growth, and selected measures of non-market activities that affect the economy—and these concepts have merit. Rather than replacing GDP, the goal might be extending and supplementing GDP and the national accounts, rather than their replacement.
Over time the national accounts have been constantly updated and extended to address changes in the economy and to keep them relevant, and many of the measurement issues raised in the current debate can be addressed within the context of these accounts. Yet extensions of the national accounts cannot be allowed to subject a critical tool for economic policy to uncertainty. Past efforts to expand conventional GDP have foundered on the inevitable problems of subjectivity and uncertainty inherent in measuring happiness, household work and other non-market activities. Critics rightly fear that the inclusion of such uncertain and subjective values in GDP will seriously diminish the essential role of the national accounts to financial markets, central banks, tax authorities and governments worldwide in measuring and managing the market economy.
Much work has focused on how to successfully broaden the utility of GDP, while preserving its core integrity. Several National Academy of Sciences studies on accounting for the environment (Nordhaus and Kokkelenberg, eds, 1999) and non-market production (Abraham and Mackie, eds, 2005), as well as the System of National Accounts (1993) guidelines for compiling GDP, have concluded that an expansion of the GDP accounts should take place in supplemental, or satellite, accounts that extend their scope without reducing the usefulness of the core GDP accounts.
Recognising the concerns of subjectivity and uncertainty, the focus should remain on creating "new" estimates within the framework of the existing accounts. For example, the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission (2009), which explored expanded welfare measures, has suggested a number of ways that "classical GDP issues" can be addressed within existing GDP accounts or through an extension and improvement of measures included in existing accounts.
The US Bureau of Economic Analysis focuses on just such improvements, and President Obama this year proposed extensions within the scope of the existing accounts that would provide new measures of:
There are, however, limits to what can reasonably be included in GDP. For many years the problem has not been with GDP, but rather the singular focus on GDP alone as a measure of society's welfare. Many non-market measures of welfare may be better included in such measures as the newly authorised US National Academies Key National Indicators System.
These and other efforts in the coming years will lead to a more inclusive set of measurement tools that will enhance our understanding of countries' standards of living. This progress is inevitable, but it does not render current GDP data inadequate. GDP will continue to play a crucial role in measuring social progress in and among countries.
The moderator's rebuttal remarks
Apr 23rd 2010 | Patrick Lane
Welcome to the second, "rebuttal" stage of the debate. From what both Andrew Oswald and Steve Landefeld say, and from the comments from the floor, it's clear that whether you support or reject the motion depends to a large extent on how you define "living standards". Are they limited to material comfort, or do they cover broader, less tangible concepts, not least happiness? This difference of view emerged in the first few online remarks, and it's been a constant theme. Pythian Legume, for instance, is "relatively certain that a claim that it [ie, GDP] does not measure national happiness is off point". Belfast citizen argues: "It is quite true for Mr Landefeld to say that GDP was not designed to be a well-being measure—though that concedes Prof Oswald's case at the outset—but it is treated by most OECD governments as if it were a proxy for well-being."
Here's another dividing line, not yet obvious on the floor but plain between the protagonists（GRE：n提倡者）: is GDP simply out of date, or can it be improved or supplemented by other measures of living standards, however defined? Mr Oswald says that, given the apparent decline in psychological measures of well-being in rich nations, GDP has not (as Mr Landefeld believes) "stood the test of time". It is too narrow an indicator of things that matter to remain a valuable indicator today.
Mr Landefeld remarks that if measures of happiness have not moved much over time, their merits as measures of living standards are in question. Better, he says, to augment GDP with other measures on an economic "dashboard". He suggests that GDP will remain the most closely watched.
On the floor, other themes have emerged. One is perhaps best illustrated by KCCM, who believes that the debate "exemplifies（v举例证明） the economic and attitudinal gulf between developed and developing economies". GDP may seem out of date in the rich world, he says, where most people have satisfactory food and shelter, but in poorer countries, "quantity reigns supreme because many simply do not yet have enough". High GDP growth numbers are a symbol of rising living standards—or, as KCCM put it, of "ability to provide more of what their growing populations realluy need and, eventually, want".
Another topic is the tension between living standards of whole societies and those of individuals or households. A related subject is the distribution of income. Plainly, GDP can capture only aggregates or (if you divide by population) averages. It won't tell you about the living standards of individuals, the gap between rich and poor, or the concentration of riches at the top. It's not supposed to, some may say—GDP per person is a measure of central tendency, not dispersion—but for many participants that's not the point.
Mehmet Asici suggests that GDP may be a fair measure of living standards in fairly equal societies with strong welfare states, but not in places where the distribution of income is highly skewed（GRE：a 倾斜的）. Several participants have said that the answer is not to measure GDP alone, but to have lots of indicators of material and psychological well-being. That in turn raises another question: can these meaningfully be combined into a single measure, or does it make more sense to look at several (back to the "dashboard"), sometimes paying more attention to one indicator and sometimes to another? Quite a few people mentioned the UN Human Development Index. One speaker, haripolit, said flatly that it was pointless to look any farther. Others thought the answer was more complicated.
Before we hear Mr Oswald's and Mr Landefeld's closing statements, we'll have contributions from guest speakers. The first of these will be Enrico Giovannini, formerly chief statistician of the OECD and now head of the Italian national statistical agency. The rebuttals and the guests' statements will, I'm sure, provoke more debate.
The proposer's rebuttal remarks
Apr 23rd 2010 | Andrew Oswald
Steve Landefeld presents his view cogently, but he proposes an old-fashioned vision that is driven by conventional ways of thinking rather than modern evidence, and he makes no mention of green issues or sustainability.
Here is an example:
It was a catastrophic decline in living standards that prompted the development of national, or GDP, accounts. Trying to design policies in the 1930s….
I agree with this assessment about the origins of GDP measurement. But of course such days are long, long gone. This is not an issue relevant to the case for or against GDP in 2010.
Here is a further example:
GDP, and the broader set of national income, product and wealth accounts, has stood the test [of] time and no other measure has proven a worthy alternative.
This is an assertion for which Mr Landefeld gives no evidence. On some measures of mental health, for example, as I tried to explain in the first stage of the debate, there is research evidence that levels of psychological well-being in rich nations are worsening through time. If so, it would seem to me, and I presume to other observers, that the "test" has been failed.
Mr Landefeld also argues that:
There is no broader social measurement tool that officials would agree is valid and useful.
This is not true: see the Stiglitz report.
Mr Landefeld suggests that it would seem irresponsible to abandon what he sees as the most comprehensive and reliable system currently available. Readers will have to judge for themselves. In my opinion, this takes us back to the kind of status-quo positions adopted in debates since at least the Middle Ages when it was proposed to give up the view that the Earth was the centre of the universe. Presumably we should choose our intellectual positions on the basis of modern data and not because ideas are familiar to us or previously long-accepted.
Mr Landefeld says that the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission (2009), which explored expanded welfare measures, has suggested a number of ways that "classical GDP issues" can be addressed within existing GDP accounts or through an extension and improvement of measures included in existing accounts. Yet, as a read of the report on the web will make clear, his is not in an obvious way an even-handed（GRE：a.公平的） assessment of the Commission (on which I served). For example, he does not mention the central recommendations in the Stiglitz Report about the need to measure human well-being rather than GDP.
Mr Landefeld believes that alternatives to GDP have…"foundered（GRE：v计划失败；沉没；倒塌） on the inevitable problems of subjectivity and uncertainty inherent in measuring happiness, household work and other non-market activities". Unfortunately, this is an assertion without data to support it. More important, it is time to think about what economists would call the right maximand.
Consider this possibility. One of Mr Landefeld's close relatives or friends comes to him and says: "Steve, confidentially（GRE：adv 秘密地，悄悄地）, I am really hating my job and my marriage isn't working and I am feeling deeply depressed." Surely he would not say to his relative: "Not interested. Don't give me your subjectivity. Go home and count dollars."
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