Every politician from Barack Obama to Rick Perry realizes that “jobs” is the number one issue on the minds of struggling Americans. The former may pad his job creation numbers with temporary, government-spawned census jobs and the latter may neglect to mention that the majority of jobs created by the private sector in his state, Texas, are minimum wage subsistence gigs you can’t feed a family on; so the ideological war over which sector is more effective at job creation drags on academically in Congress and the media while real people are hurting.
But fret not, America. There is hope (we hope): The Great Green Hope. A July 13, 2011 report by the Brookings Institution, Sizing the Clean Economy: A National and Regional Green Jobs Assessment, suggests that the rhetoric out there pushing for “green jobs” may be more than just liberal jive.
In its report, Brookings concludes that the clean economy “employs some 2.7 million workers… in establishments spread across a diverse group of industries.” The “clean” sector of the economy, which Brookings defines as including “the solar photovoltaic (PV), wind, fuel cell, smart grid, biofuel, and battery industries,” currently employs more Americans than the entire fossil fuel industry, and is growing at a faster rate than the national economy.
The report finds not only that the clean sector’s basic growth and employment statistics are encouraging, but that the quality of the jobs it creates—and the relation of those jobs to the health of the national economy—show that large-scale investment in that sector would be good for both investors and workers. It notes that 26 percent of jobs in the clean economy are in manufacturing (compared to only 9 percent in the general economy), a sector that’s been dying for some good news since global trade policies paved the way for massive outsourcing of its jobs to places like China and Mexico. Clean economy manufacturing jobs are also “export intensive,” meaning that the value of what they produce for export is much greater than what they cost to maintain—a fact that should be encouraging both to investors and to workers looking for job security.
Brookings also claims that the jobs the clean economy produces pay, on average, 13 percent more than median U.S. wages and can be performed by employees who are only “middle-skilled”—in other words, people whose level of educational attainment is typically lower than average—which means that more and better opportunities are available to more people.
The jobs appear to be fairly evenly split between the public and private sectors, so the argument over which philosophy of job creation works better is irrelevant; evidence shows that both are required for clean sector industries to grow organically. Brookings does advocate in its report, however, for some governmental support or subsidy for clean industries, to provide more “affordable, risk-tolerant, and larger-scale capital” to encourage growth at critical junctures, since many of the clean sector’s best ideas collapse at the level at which industries must “scale up” to be able to succeed commercially. The report suggests a number of things government could do—without spending a dime—that would expose these industries to less growth-related risk, like streamlining permit processes for industry buildout or shifting existing government contracts to competing clean sector companies. It also expresses at least vague support for a national carbon cap-and-trade system, and stresses the importance of maintaining state and federal funding for research and development in clean energy sciences.
Still, there are reasons for skepticism about businesses in the clean economy, chief among them stories of poor regional planning, lack of sufficiently scrutinized organization or shady backroom deal fiascos with slash-and-burn investors. Evergreen Solar, touted by Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration as a model clean energy company and green job creator, recently filed for bankruptcy and laid off 800 workers just a few years after receiving $58 million in Massachusetts taxpayer dollars and then announcing that it was outsourcing many of its jobs to China. California-based solar company Solyndra, whose $500 million federal loan guarantee appears to have been fast-tracked by the White House, also went belly-up this month, sparking a snowballing political scandal, and other private-versus-public interest controversies surround other green energy industries such as wind and biomass.
Warts and all, however, the clean economy still shows enormous promise for the creation of decent jobs in America despite administrative incompetence and speculative greed, and may yet furnish reason for hope in a country struggling to regain a manufacturing base and restore a middle class that was once the envy of the world.
