Earlier this year, the Department of Energy (DOE) finalized a regulation setting energy efficiency standards for microwave ovens. At the time, Heather Zichal, the Deputy Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, had this to say about the regulation:
…in his State of the Union Address this year, the President set a bold new goal: to cut in half the energy wasted in our homes and businesses over the next 20 years. Part of how we will achieve that goal is by making appliances more energy efficient. Not only will that help Americans keep more money in their pockets, it will also curb pollution and spark innovation that creates jobs and ultimately brings better products to the marketplace. That’s why we are proud to announce today that the Department of Energy has finalized new energy efficiency standards for microwaves… (emphasis added)
I’ve written elsewhere about why Americans should be skeptical of the environmental benefits from this regulation, as well as other energy efficiency regulations emanating from the Department of Energy. Putting that aside for a moment, I’d like to focus on the last part of Ms. Zichal’s comment, that energy efficiency regulations will create jobs.
As an example, let’s look at the microwave oven regulation that Ms. Zichal cites in her blog post. According to the Department of Energy’s own employment analysis, the employment effects of this regulation are negligible. Since American consumers import roughly 99% of microwaves purchased, the DOE expects that effects on domestic production jobs will be virtually zero.
In addition, DOE models indirect employment effects on other industries as a result of changes in consumer behavior and investment decisions resulting from the regulation. While these numbers are highly uncertain given the inherent difficulty in predicting these things, the DOE estimated the rule will probably eliminate jobs in the short term, estimating between 551 jobs destroyed and 17 jobs created by 2016. In the long run, employment effects may be positive, with the regulation potentially creating between 153 and 697 jobs by 2020. However, the DOE notes there are limitations inherent in its model when calculating these effects, especially when trying to predict jobs created years in the future. For example, the DOE states:
Because [the agency’s model] does not incorporate price changes, the employment impacts predicted by [the model] would over-estimate the magnitude of actual job impacts over the long run for this rule.
The DOE goes on:
…in long-run equilibrium there is no net effect on total employment since wages adjust to bring the labor market into equilibrium. Nonetheless, even to the extent that markets are slow to adjust, DOE anticipates that net labor market impacts will be negligible over time due to the small magnitude of the short-term effects.
Creating jobs should never be the primary reason for justifying a regulation. In most cases, jobs created by regulations are compliance jobs, which constitute a cost of regulating, not a benefit. More importantly, these types of predictions about jobs created and destroyed ignore the true employment costs of regulation that occur when individuals lose their jobs because of a rule. These costs include things like lost earnings, loss of health insurance, stress, additional health effects, etc. Despite this, by the DOE’s own estimates job creation does not appear to be a solid justification for this particular energy efficiency standard.