Reading around on reactions to the latest oil shale hubbub, I keep seeing conservatives saying that greens against dirty energy development are opposing "American jobs."
It's important that everyone involved in fighting oil shale -- and other drill-and-burn energy policies -- understand something simple: the U.S. energy sector has very low "labor intensity." That is to say, fossil fuel exploration, drilling, and refinement is capital-intensive and energy-intensive, but it doesn't create many jobs.
A dollar spent on efficiency or renewables creates more jobs than a dollar spent on fossil fuel development.
So it's the fossil crowd that opposes American jobs. If they wanted to create jobs, they'd support putting people to work transitioning the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels.
(See "Energy Efficiency and Job Creation" by Geller, DiCicco, and Laitner, and "Putting Renewables To Work: How Many Jobs Can the Clean Energy Industry Generate?" [PDF] by Kammen, Kapadia, and Fripp.)
Not all green jobs are created equal
Comments View as Flat
Millstone Posted 6:47 am
23 Jul 2008
Kammen, Kapadia and Fripp link isn't working.
404 error for me.
Permalink
Adam Stein Posted 6:52 am
23 Jul 2008
It's here
http://rael.berkeley.edu/old-site/renewables.jobs.2006.pd ...
www.terrapass.com/blog
Permalink
JohnnyRook Posted 7:14 am
23 Jul 2008
Conservatives aren't really interested in job
creation outside of the fossil-fuel industry. What they're really interested in are profits for companies that extract fossil fuels. This is just another case of "What's good for General Motors is good for the country (without the vice versa part).
So much of the talk about satisfying America's energy needs comes from existing fossil-fuel energy corporations, which are spending a fortune on advertising to convince people that if we try to shift to sustainable energy we will end up without energy or jobs.
If conservatives admit the truth, that the transition to a green economy will create jobs and strengthen the economy, the jig will be up for them.
Another part of the problem is that rank and file right-wingers have bought the ideological argument that environmentalists hate technological civilization and want to go back to some Rousseauist pastoral idyll. They see arguments that sustainable energy will strengthen the economy as a subterfuge by leftist environmentalists to enact policies that, in reality, will destroy it.
Shifting to sustainable sources of energy will make the nation rich, but the traditional energy companies poorer. They don't want the public to understand that it's interests are not the same as those of Exxon, Peabody Energy, etc. (Have you see the "Do you own an oil company ad...?)
[Blogging for the future at Climaticide Chronicles]
"My True Religion Is Kindness" -- The Dalai Lama/---/Do you know why 350ppm is important?
Permalink
red green Posted 8:11 am
23 Jul 2008
more reports...
"A dollar spent on efficiency or renewables creates more jobs than a dollar spent on fossil fuel development." This is indeed the take-home message. And we know that renewables development is already creating substantial numbers of jobs, even though we are merely in the early phases of a transition away from fossil fuels.
Another report worth looking at was issued late last year by the American Solar Energy Society (http://www.ases.org/images/stories/ASES-JobsReport-Final. ...).
And what's true for the US is true worldwide. See a preliminary report I have written together with colleagues at Cornell University for the UN Environment Programme, at http://www.unep.org/labour_environment/features/greenjobs ... with a summary at http://www.unep.org/labour_environment/PDFs/Green-Jobs-Ba ...). It looks at renewables and energy-intensive sectors including transportation, buildings, etc. The final version will be available this fall.
Permalink
WWAGD?! Posted 11:48 am
23 Jul 2008
Creating Wealth...or Jobs?
The Libs basically want a feudal system where Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama get to live in big houses and a lot of serfs run around adjusting the wind towers for them. In the Pelosi-Clinton view of the world, there is no such thing as a "middle class" and their noisy 4 bedroom homes with central air conditioning and kids and minivans and happiness. Ted Turner and Richard Branson get to own half of Montana and the Caribbean and you get to scrub the floors...oh, but don't fret, because by not having anything of value yourself you're actually "saving the planet".
When will you idiots learn that oil is what made most people in this country and this world have the energy to move out of the mud and into decent clean sanitary living?
Permalink
stopgreenpath Posted 12:38 pm
23 Jul 2008
and local creates more than centralized
if we greenies are serious about jobs creation, we will look to local, decentralized renewables instead of Big Wind and Big Solar, which don't provide as much employment. PV and microwind installation is local, skilled, and can't be outsourced.
most of the manufacturing, design and engineering for Big Wind and Big Solar is being done overseas, with a few construction jobs and a few O & M jobs...
the greenest energy is that which you needn't ever produce.
Permalink
GonzoDon Posted 1:04 pm
23 Jul 2008
"Job creation" is a bit of a canard
If you want to "create jobs", you can do thinkgs like force people to build new dams with wheelbarrows rather than dumptrucks, and you can outlaw Eli Whitney's cotton gin, which put a hell of a lot of cotton-seed pickers out of work.
For that reason, I'm always uncomfortable with strategies which "create jobs". I'm more comfortable with strategies that use resources (including human labor) more efficiently, more humanely, and more sustainably. Sometimes that will eliminate a number of less-desirable, low-skill jobs, in the name of efficiencies. Which is OK (in my opinion), as long as the resulting societal benefits (e.g. profits) get widely shared.
The latter, of course, is the big problem. More and more of society's profits are getting shared among a handful of obscenely wealthy owners of the means of production. THAT is what has to be changed!
Permalink
Kedwards2283 Posted 3:35 am
24 Jul 2008
PERI Green Job Report
Here's another interesting breakdown of "green" jobs. I don't know if I agree with calling trucking a green job, even if it is delivering solar panels.
Job Opportunities for the Green Economy: A State-by-State Picture of Occupations that Gain from Green Investments
http://www.peri.umass.edu/green_jobs/
Permalink
Wolverine Posted 2:12 pm
24 Jul 2008
Jobs Are Not My Priority, But ...
this is a great argument to be able to retort with.
However, be careful about the "job" argument in general. Our argument should be that right livelihood is more important than jobs. If you just want to create jobs, you could open a baby burning factory. Prioritizing the job issue gets you Nazi Germany if you're not very careful.
Permalink
MAD MAC Posted 3:13 pm
24 Jul 2008
Not if you don't have a job
"Our argument should be that right livelihood is more important than jobs."
Wolverine
Try telling some guy who has a family, mortgage payments to make, food and electric bills to pay, that jobs are not important. See how "right" someone will live if he's unemployed and losing his house.
Victory in Pattani
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 3:40 pm
24 Jul 2008
Shocking depravity!
A sort of twist on Swift?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
"...open a baby burning factory"
How could you even mention this? Shame.
Of course aborted fetuses would remove the ethical restrictions.
Biodiesel can be made from the fat.
But if you use live babies, you would need a way to decide which babies would turn out to be bush voters before you made the selection. That would take a time machine to look into the future.
Possible from a theoretical POV, but not yet actually built. Maybe that's what the rapture will be like. Jesus will burn all the bush voters as babies, that would be heaven on earth.
Population problem, solved! Hehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
Permalink
Wolverine Posted 4:15 am
26 Jul 2008
Baby Burning & Right Livelihood
John,
You missed my point, though the offensiveness of the baby burning portion obviously worked on you. The point is that there are many environmentally and ecologically destructive jobs in this destructive society. If "jobs" is your priority, you can easily end up with a very destructive result. That was the point of the baby burning example, and that's the reason I chose the most offensive thing I could think of.
Mac,
As someone who had one quarter of his family killed by the Nazis, I can unequivocally say that it's far more important what people are doing than whether they're employed. I'd much rather that those running concentration camps, and even in the German military, were unemployed than that they did what they did. The same goes for those in jobs that are environmentally and/or ecologically destructive.
Permalink