Going Obama One Better

You've all heard the president's claims about job creation from alternative energy. It started out as 3 million new jobs "created" by a national commitment to alternative to energy, but when he started to get questions about the methodology behind that statement, he retreated a bit and changed his stump speech to jobs "saved or created."

Either way it's virtually impossible to prove or disprove, which is why it is such a political winner.

Well the University of California has no use for such equivocation. David Roland-Holst, a UC Berkeley economics professor, has authored a study that finds that "moving half of California's electric power needs to renewable energy sources such as wind, solar or biomass would help create half-a-million jobs over the next 40 years." Boom. Take it to the bank.

In fact, Roland-Holst sees this as the silver bullet solution to all of California's budget problems, which should be music to our green-energy-enthusiast-Governor.

Specifically, the study's assumptions are:

"using clean sources for half the state's electric power while increasing efficiency by 1.5 percent each year would create 500,000 new jobs with a $100 billion payroll."

$100 billion translates into some serious tax revenue... maybe he's on to something. Who's to say? Well, how about Dave O'Reilly and Carl Pope.

They argued it out this week in San Francisco-- guess where each one stood on the issue?

It's all in the Mercury News's write up... enjoy:

Study: Clean energy will stimulate Calif. economy [San Jose Mercury News]