Green Jobs - or working for unprofitable industries

Think Chrysler and GM in this discussion

But what about all those green collar jobs we will be creating? They will be created by government run industries who do not need to produce a profit. They just need to keep sucking up your taxes. Without profit, there are no investors and these companies cannot survive on their own without investment capital. (This sounds a lot like small defense contractors to me.) But, if this administration remains consistent, they will be union jobs.

And what Obama proposes to fix that profit problem is to kill the competition through carbon taxes. He will make current energy (electricity from coal, oil and natural gas, plus consumer products like natural gas itself, oil, diesel, gasoline, propane) so unaffordable that you as a consumer will be forced to purchase the green alternative. At a cost increase of maybe 150% (we really have no idea except we know green energy isn't competitive and we didn't see a lot of it show up when gas went to over $4 per gallon). All to pay that new tax (regardless of your income) on energy and to sustain unprofitable ethanol, windmills and such. How do I know that? He said so in a radio interview when he was the temporary US Senator from Chicago. One thing you do need to give him credit for, he does mean it when he says "as I have said before." We just don't listen.

Cap and trade just means new taxes - what you trade are pieces of paper you bought from the government allowing you to produce carbon dioxide, which by the way, trees need to survive. This is the government creating a market for something that itself has absolutely no intrinsic value. Sort of like extortion/protection schemes run by street gangs.

The consequence of cap and trade (energy taxes) is that everything you buy, not just energy, becomes more expensive. Creating goods, packaging products, getting it to market all require energy. That 20-50% price hike in your grocery products over the last 2 years were a direct consequence of fuel prices doubling. It's not that the cows were more expensive, it's the energy to process the milk (pasteurize and chill), put it in more expensive packaging and deliver it with more costly diesel that makes the milk more expensive.

Well one caveat here, under cap and trade, cows will be more expensive because you will need to buy government credits in order to permit them to fart - a dangerous and climate changing emission of methane. Imagine what that will do to the price of beans.