Someone help me puzzle this out:
Proposition 1: A shift to renewable energy and energy efficiency will result in a boom in green-collar jobs -- good service-industry work that can't be outsourced. This proposition is attractive because it holds forth the promise of a grand alliance between greens and the labor movement. See, e.g., Tom Friedman and everyone who posts on Grist.
Proposition 2: The optimism over green-collar jobs is a classic example of the make-work bias, a widespread economic fallacy that mistakes amount of work for wealth creation. The actual effect of greenhouse-gas reductions on labor markets is unclear, so environmentalists should stick to environmental policy. See, e.g., various environmental economists.
I don't have a clever opinion here, although I will say that the case for a positive labor impact from energy efficiency measures seems decently solid. Efficiency is, after all, an unambiguously good thing for the economy as a whole. If it costs us less to get the same amount of stuff, we're all richer. Certainly this is a nice thing for consumers, and because energy industries tend not to be labor-intensive, we can expect that wealth creation at the expense of energy producers will be a net benefit for employment as well. I think.
The impact of renewable energy, on the other hand, is more difficult to suss out. More to the point, it's not clear that anyone has sussed it out. Discuss.
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Comments
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GreenEngineer Posted 5:39 am
11 Jan 2008
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GreenEngineer Posted 5:45 am
11 Jan 2008
In the short term, the demand for equipment will lead to new opportunities in engineering and manufacturing. These may or may not be greater than the parallel loss of jobs in the fossil-fuel energy business and the industries that supply them. However, I would expect it to be greater (i.e. more than make up for the decline of fossilized business) because the fossil industries have had decades to wring out as much efficiency and mechanization as they can and to minimize their employment base. Renewable energy, being a relatively underdeveloped sector, is not going to operate as efficiently and will probably generate more jobs at least initially.
In the long term, a major shift to renewables will mean a decrease in the externalized costs that fossil energy sources currently impose on society. This will be a huge win, but will probably take decades before it's fully appreciated. But it stands to reason that if we can maintain a technological society without poisoning ourselves daily, we'll be better off than an equivalently advanced society in which ubiquitous toxicity is required in order to maintain the technologically elevated status.
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Sean Casten Posted 6:00 am
11 Jan 2008
As a result, a preferential focus on efficient power plants leads to more power plants to serve the same total MW load. This has a rather large positive impact on local job creation, of both the white collar (engineering, finance, etc.) and blue collar (manufacturing, construction, etc.) varieties.
I believe ACEEE quantified this benefit some time ago, although I don't recall precisely where.
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Jon Rynn Posted 7:18 am
11 Jan 2008
On the more general question, though, it seems clear that the fossil fuel jobs will disappear with the fossil fuels, so to a certain extent any green collar jobs that happen now are a good start on constructing a fossil-fuel free society. However, that's not something mainstream economics is particularly good at, because the price signals from the market aren't there yet.
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GreenEngineer Posted 7:35 am
11 Jan 2008
There are many factors which prevent our actual oil production rate from achieving the levels that would be imposed purely by geologic and technical limits. Geopolitical access is a big one (leading to the "fear premium" on the price of oil), but manpower shortages are a factor as well.
The result is that we will experience an effective peak (peak lite) before we hit the limits of total production.
This is good news, though, because it means that rather a sharp peak and dropoff, such as that dictated by the Hubbart curve, we'll probably see a long plateau where production doesn't grow much (and doesn't keep pace with demand) but doesn't crash either. It will buy us time -- hopefully enough -- to come up with alternatives to petroleum consumption.
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apsmith Posted 7:48 am
11 Jan 2008
I.e. the more jobs and money goes into the energy sector as a whole, the slower growth will be elsewhere. And that's not really what we should hope for (prop 2).
What you're talking about in your 3rd paragraph is more jobs outside of the energy sector, assuming energy/efficiency makes stuff cheaper. That's the opposite issue. If "green" energy means we need to add more labor to the energy sector, that makes stuff more expensive. It may be worth doing anyway, but not for economic reasons: it's worth doing because it benefits the environment. And that's exactly the point of "environmentalists should stick to environmental policy" - I agree!
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Sean Casten Posted 8:11 am
11 Jan 2008
Clearly, this model is in jeopardy, as pension funds get cut in bankruptcy courts (see: United, Delta, LTV Steel, etc.) and benefits plans are scaled back. But this only makes that model less attractive.
Compare that to the gaudy equity pay packages that folks have gotten lately who were lucky enough to go to work for Google/Microsoft/etc. when they were still in early start up stage and giving away big equity packages rather than salary. And at the same time, recognize that the current crop of students didn't grow up knowing rationing, dustbowls or even really a lack of GameBoys - for this generation, upside is much more likely than downside. So put yourself in the mode of a college kid deciding what to study. It ought not surprise us that there are so many kids choosing to study computer science or electronics engineering (the other "EE" - very rare to find grads in power engineering nowadays). Nor ought it surprise us that there are so few studying petroleum geology or auto manufacturing.
This supply side of the equation is critical to understanding why the the old line "brown" industries are having a hard time finding employees - but it's not because they're brown, per se. In this context, the green jobs boom will come, but it will come most dramatically once we see a green company become the Netscape of our day and turn out a pile of under-30 gazillionaires.
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GreenEngineer Posted 9:18 am
11 Jan 2008
I.e. the more jobs and money goes into the energy sector as a whole, the slower growth will be elsewhere. And that's not really what we should hope for (prop 2).
Not necessarily, because not all jobs make an equal contribution to the well-being of society (and frequently this value has little correlation to their pay scale). If an engineer stops designing injection molds for little plastic dohickies to put in Happy Meals and starts designing wind turbines instead, he's gone from making something that is essentially trash to making something that produces long-term value. That's a clear win over the long haul.
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Nucbuddy Posted 10:20 am
11 Jan 2008
How could a wind-turbine produce long-term value?
If machines that make Happy Meal doohickies are not valuable, why do they command market-value?
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wiscidea Posted 2:01 pm
11 Jan 2008
What about the guy who burns my prairie remnant almost every spring, designs and plants 40-acre native grassland restorations, and installs natural landscaping (low maintenance and low water) around corporate office buildings?
What about the ecologists landowners around my home -- e.g., farmers -- hire to look at their woods and develop sustainable woodlot management plans, including strategies for working around or even encouraging populations of endangered plants and animals?
Time to think outside the box.
More people earning a living protecting our environment translates into fewer people standing in the way.
FORWARD!
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trock Posted 11:32 pm
11 Jan 2008
If we all just got into the habit of making sandwiches and putting a baked potato in the microwave, we could all save money, many people would be out of jobs and fortunes and we'd probably be healthier. Some people think that if someone paid for it is has value and if there is no money transacted, it has no value.
My kid hugged me the other day, no value. I ate a triple burger, french fries and chocolate shake, for the fast food and medical communities; it has value because I paid for it.
My vegetable garden out back, value only for the seeds I bought, vegetables bought at the supermarket, value for the vegetables and the thousand miles to get them here.
I get killed in a car crash, value in the medical care, the insurance, hearse and funeral, being able to swerve out of the way in time, no value. Okay, so maybe I can make more money if I swerved out of the way, but to me, that act of swerving out of the way, it's not about the economics, its about my life.
It's all about what we measure.
Putting in non-carbon sources of energy so that the next 50 generations can live in a better not over heated world, priceless.
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nedruod Posted 7:56 am
12 Jan 2008
One, there is definitely more short term work created by the need for efficient design, for replacement of inefficient infrastructure, and for the build up of renewable energy sources. Efficient design also requires more ongoing long term work.
The second part, wealth, is hard to answer because wealth itself is not well defined, especially in a long term sense. It's relatively possible to sum out current wealth by dollar figures, but future long term wealth can only be described as a complex set of items, capabilities, responsibilities, risks, etc, and all of these have a relative value which may differ not only from generation to generation, or individual to individual, but even over a single individual's lifetime.
Acknowledging that difficulty we can see sources of wealth that will emerge. Efficiency and renewables represent expanded capabilities. Renewables are the larger example because we with enough investment end up with what today would be considered limitless energy.
Right now we have an energy deficit. We are using more than we can sustainably use, given our current mode of production, its limited resources, and its impacts which will require a great amount of work and energy to reverse.
This gives the impression that efficiency and renewables only cause work, which may require diversion of work on other topics. But efficiency and renewables can, after we are no longer in a deficit, result in excess energy which used appropriately will reduce work per unit of production elsewhere.
On the topic of work and diversion, a key element is worth remembering. The world has a vast surplus work force which is not being allowed to participate, and anyone who thinks work on efficiency, renewables or less impactful farming requires diversion of workers should remember the untapped workforce. There's certainly no need to grow international populations in order to grow the international workforce.
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amazingdrx Posted 3:03 pm
12 Feb 2008
"They point to companies like SolarCity, an installer of rooftop solar cells based in Foster City. Since its founding in 2006, it has grown to 215 workers and $29 million in annual sales. "It is hard to find installers," said Lyndon Rive, the chief executive. "We're at the stage where if we continue to grow at this pace, we won't be able to sustain the growth."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/technology/01solar.html ...
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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