New reports: 1.7 million new “green” jobs

Posted on June 19, 2009
Filed Under Uncategorized |

jobmap The latests unemployment rate reported earlier this month–9.4%–is the highest in 26 years. There was, howver, a faint silver lining to that gloomy dark cloud: the rate at which people are losing their jobs is slowing down. In these grim economic times, we’ll happily latch on to any piece of “good” news, but the truth is we’re going to have to stop losing jobs and start creating them for the economy to being to recover. And clean energy and energy efficiency might be just the way to do that.

The energy and climate bill that Congress is considering–well, at least one version of it–would invest $150 billion in “green” jobs over the next ten years. And a couple of new reports from the Center for American Progress and UMass Amherst say that investment will create 1.7 million new jobs.

Here’s how the Center for American Progress summarizes the data:

This economic transformation will engage a huge range of people and activities. But there are only three interrelated objectives that will define the entire enterprise:

Dramatically increasing energy efficiency.

Dramatically lowering the cost of supplying energy from such renewable sources of energy as solar, wind and biomass.

Mandating limits and then establishing a price on pollution from the burning of oil, coal, and natural gas.

It is crucial for economic policymakers and the American people to understand the likely effects of these three overarching objectives as much as possible. Specifically, we need to gauge our success in curbing CO2 emissions alongside the broader effects on the U.S. economy, particularly on employment opportunities, economic growth and people’s incomes.

This is a really good example of how the legislation now before Congress is as much about jobs and the price of energy as it is about addressing climate change. There was a time when people just talked about a “global warming bill” that would limit greenhouse gas pollution. And that is certainly the foundation for the current debate–but reports like the ones released this week illustrate how the discussion has gotten much broader to include the huge economic impact that this kind of bill would have.

Check out this interactive map to see how many jobs would be created–and a before-and-after unemployment rate.

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