President Barack Obama is at his oratorical best when he talks about the “green jobs.”

“When folks lift up the hoods on the cars of the future, I want them to see engines stamped ‘Made in America,'” he said in August. “When new batteries to store solar power come off the line, I want to see printed on the side ‘Made in America.’ When new technologies are developed and new industries are formed, I want them to be made right here in America.”

Right on! There’s not a man or woman in America who doesn’t want that.

But if the example of the light bulb industry is any indication, those motors and batteries will, unfortunately, say “Made in China.”

A story in Wednesday’s Washington Post outlined the all-too-familiar story of how the U.S. does the inventing but workers in other countries reap the rewards of factory production jobs.

The Post reported how the last major General Electric factory in the U.S. making ordinary incandescent light bulbs will close this month, putting another 200 people out of work.

It’s the predictable result of a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress, which essentially banned production of old-fashioned light bulbs by 2014.

By then, Americans are expected to have fully switched to CFLs, or compact fluorescent lamps, which are almost all made in China, and which are 75 percent more efficient.

The story will be familiar to anyone who has watched the demoralizing decline of American manufacturing might over the past half-century.

The Post reports there were nearly 20 million manufacturing jobs in the U.S. in 1979. By 2009, only 12 million of those jobs remained.

Lewiston-Auburn knows how this goes. First the jobs moved to states with lower labor costs, mainly in the South.

When those costs began to rise, the jobs went overseas.

While CFLs were first produced in 1973 by engineers working at GE’s famous Nela Park research lab, they required more labor to produce than incandescent bulbs.

In the early 1990s, a Chinese-American businessman began producing CFLs in China. Today, that one firm makes 40 percent of the bulbs used in the U.S. The other 60 percent are also made overseas.

The reason is simple. General Electric researched what it would take to retrofit its incandescent plants to make CFLs. With U.S. wage scales and regulation, the bulbs would cost 50 percent more than the ones coming from China.

The workers at the last GE bulb plant, located in Winchester, Va., averaged $30 per hour.

The story is the same for other green technologies. Nearly all of the large lithium-ion batteries used in hybrid and electric cars come from China.

Most of the high-tech equipment being used for wind turbines comes from either Europe or China.

It’s good for the president to gush about Americans building the equipment that will fuel the green revolution.

Talk alone, however, will not change the basic economic factors that determine where those green-tech jobs land.

Right now, those factors still favor other countries.

editorialboard@sunjournal.com

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