President Obama, the Congressional Democrats, and environmentalists around the country keep talking up the idea that implementing new environmental regulations that raise the costs of energy, goods, and services is going to trigger a jobs boom of one sort or another. “See, when folks lift up the hoods on the cars of the future, I want them to see engines stamped ‘Made in America,’” Obama said in an August 16 speech at a Wisconsin plant. “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 made right here in America.”

But as the upcoming closure of America’s last major incandescent lightbulb factory shows, such claims are generally bunk. Even the Washington Post, not exactly famous for its conservatism, points out that while the Obama administration pledges 800,000 “clean energy” manufacturing jobs by 2012, “the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States has been shrinking for decades, from 19.5 million in 1979 to 11.6 million this year, a decline of 40 percent.”

Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China. Consisting of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, they require more hand labor, which is cheaper there. So though they were first developed by American engineers in the 1970s, none of the major brands make CFLs in the United States.

This is no surprise to anyone who has (unlike the president and his allies in Congress, apparently) ever bothered to think about the difference in labor rates, worker-safety regulations, environmental regulations, and raw material costs in Asia. Apparently the understanding that Chinese manufacturing is simply less costly than ours is beyond the grasp of liberal politicians in America. Unless Americans are willing to work with Chinese labor rates and workplace and environmental standards, or to enact destructive trade barriers, our new green energy devices, whether lightbulbs, windmills, solar panels, or what have you will be manufactured in Asia.

Oh, and about those “Made in America” batteries, Mr. President? “Advanced battery manufacturing currently is dominated by China, Japan, and South Korea, together accounting for 98 percent of the market in 2009.” Read more at blog.american.com