IF WE'RE TALKING JOBS, PAINT THEM GREEN

I'm constantly adding research reports to an already bulging computer file labeled CLIMATE-ECO-TOPIA. The thrust of these findings, dating back many years, is that transitioning to a sustainable green economy, although costly, would provide so many benefits in terms of human health and well-being, the environment, and the economy that it's not just necessary and urgent, but basically a no-brainer.

Solar Panel Installer//Credit: Maxpixel

I'll be writing about other aspects of this later, but today I'm just going to report on three job-related findings:

First, as of the end of 2019, the US Green Economy employed ten times more people than the entire fossil fuel industry. As reported in New Scientist on October 15 of that year, the entire fossil fuel sector of the US economy employed around 900,000 people. In contrast, the Green Economy, broadly defined, employed at least 9.5 million Americans--more than ten times those fossil fuel jobs.

Those jobs comprised about 4 percent of all US employment and the green sector now accounts for 7 percent of the GDP, about $1.3 trillion per year. 

Marc Maslin, a geoscientist at University College London, and co-author of the underlying study, pulls no punches. "The Trump administration with the 'America first' approach of 'fossil fuels are good', is stupid when it comes to economics," he says. "If you want to be a hard-nosed neoliberal economist you would say, 'Let's support the green economy as much as possible.'"

Looking globally, research published in the July 23 edition of the journal One Earth shows that if nations took the necessary steps to transition to a green economy and by doing so meet the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global heating below 2 degrees C, that would create far more new jobs than would be lost in the declining fossil-fuel sector, a net gain of at least 8 million jobs.

Many of those jobs would be in the U.S.  A separate study reported in Renewable Energy World estimates that adding enough rooftop or community solar panels to power 30 million American homes would add 1.77 million jobs. In addition, in just five years this would save $69 billion in energy bills and keep the same amount of carbon out of the atmosphere as taking 42 million cars off the road or closing 48 coal-burning power plants.

Talk about a win-win solution--and one we need to push forward on urgently.

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REA 8/8/2021