Green jobs

In Ocala, Fla., Laurance Anton has been out of work since 2008. After a futile search, at age 56, “He reluctantly returned to school to learn the kind of job skills the Obama administration is wagering will soon fuel an employment boom: solar installation, sustainable landscape design, recycling and green demolition,” The Washington Post reports.

In the classes, funded with a $2.9 million federal grant to Ocala’s work force development organization, Mr. Anton learned how to apply Ohm’s law, how to solder tiny components on circuit boards and how to disassemble rather than demolish a building. The only problem: His new skills have not brought him a single job offer. And officials who run Ocala’s green jobs training program tell the Post that’s true for three-quarters of their first 100 graduates.

“I think I have put in 200 applications,” said Mr. Anton, who exhausted his unemployment benefits months ago and now relies on food stamps and his dwindling savings.

Betting heavily on “green energy,” the Obama administration has channeled more than $90 billion from the $814 billion economic stimulus bill into clean energy technology, confident that the investment would grow into the economy’s next big thing.

“But the huge federal investment has run headlong into the stubborn reality that the market for renewable energy products — and workers — remains in its infancy,” The Post reports, optimistically.

Why? Fossil fuels remain cheaper than “renewables.”

The government response? New regulations that force people and businesses to turn to renewable energy, of course.

“Without government mandates dictating how much renewable energy utilities must use to generate electricity, or placing a price on the polluting carbon emitted by fossil fuels, they say, green energy cannot begin to reach its job creation potential,” the Post concludes.

Based on that “economic theory,” Washington could train a vast work force to produce those “Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans” now so familiar from the Harry Potter books — including along with more traditional varieties candy beans in such flavors as black pepper, dirt, earwax and vomit.

Then if they don’t sell, well … just pass laws ordering Americans to eat them. Problem solved.