Video description

On the 19th of July in 2011 the National Press Club of Australia held a debate on climate change. I will be analysing the claims Monckton made during the debate and if they are correct or not.

In this particular section of the debate Monckton makes the claim that jobs will be lost. However real world examples, and studies, show that those lost jobs are easily replaced by newly created jobs in the renewable energy industry.

Transcript

And therefore the carbon tax is the wrong solution to a non-problem. It has no place in the future of Australia. And what I should have liked to hear from the press of Australia is those pressmen speaking up for the heroes of labour, the mineworkers who are menaced with the destruction of their jobs, the men who dig the darkness underground to bring us light. These great men, a dozen of whom joined me in the Hunter Valley on the platform when I spoke there last week and received a standing ovation from their terrified community, they want you, gentlemen of the press and ladies of the press, to speak for them, the coal workers menaced by Prime Minister Brown with a destruction of their industry. And we too once had a prime minister called Brown and we learnt not to do that.

So please, speak up for your working people. The tie that I wear today and I proudly wear today is the tie of the Democratic Labor Party, Senator John Madigan's party. I had the privilege of spending yesterday with this great man, and here is a man who speaks for labour, who speaks for the people who are going to be disadvantaged by this tax.

What Monckton is arguing here is that this carbon tax will cost jobs in the Australian coal industry.

If Australia moves away from using coal due to a switch towards renewable energy sources then this will naturally cost jobs in the coal industry. And I understand that people who work in the industry are worried about their jobs.

However, Monckton does not take into account the jobs that will be created in the renewable industry; jobs that can easily replace jobs lost in the coal industry, assuming all jobs in the coal industry will be lost.

If we take for example Germany, and then only look at the jobs created by the deployment of photovoltaics, solar panels, there are over 40,000 people directly employed in the industry. This industry alone employs as many people as the entire coal industry in Australia. Both industries create just as many indirect jobs.

Studies confirm that money invested in renewables creates more jobs than if you would invest the same amount in the fossil fuel industry. This can be up to 3 times as many jobs created compared to the same investment in the fossil industry. We have many more examples of real life projects that save money and create more jobs than the fossil fuel industry does.

Shifting from one technology to another will cause job losses in the old industry, but it has been shown time and time again in history that they will be replaced.

Sources

1. Germany Trade & Invest - Record-Breaking German Solar Demand Fuels Green Job Growth (page is no longer available)
2. European Commission Research & Innovation
3. THE WORK THAT GOES INTO RENEWABLE ENERGIE (page is no longer available, an archived copy can be found here)
4. Putting Renewables to Work: How Many Jobs Can the Clean Energy Industry Generate? (page is no longer available, an archived copy can be found here)
5. Australian Coal association - Employment
6. Green Prosperity: How Clean-Energy Policies Can Fight Poverty and Raise Living Standards in the United States
7. Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative - Benefits
8. Climate Neutral Network - Participants (page is no longer available, an archived copy can be found here)
9. The economic impacts of carbon pricing

Media resources

1. Excavator - Open Pit Mining by Rene Schwietzke
2. Mining Trucks by Magnus von Koeller
3. Coal Train by Randy Slavey
4. Germany
5. Solar Mosaic by Scott Robinson
6. Geothermal bore hole by Brian Suda
7. Windturbine by Aquinoktium
8. One of ZenithSolar's solar energy systems by Siel Ju
9. Biglow Canyon Wind Farm Still Under Construction by Dave Worth