Red Tape Is Costing Green Jobs
From USA Today
A combination of federal, state, and local regulatory red tape is preventing American businesses from creating nearly 2 million new green energy jobs and generating more than a trillion dollars in economic output. Is that acceptable with 8.9% unemployment and a struggling economy? Or is there a better way?
By the estimates from a study released Thursday by TeleNomic research, 351 job-creating projects promoting energy across the country are currently snarled by a broken permitting process and by a regulatory system that fails to ensure timely reviews and actions.
For example, the Green Path North was a proposed 85-mile-long “green” power transmission line that would have brought renewable electricity from inland California to Los Angeles. A wide range of national and local environmental activist groups teamed up to force seven route and capacity revisions before the project was abandoned due to the enormous costs in fighting this opposition.
