Comments red green has made

  • 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.On It's the fossil fuel crowd that's against American jobs posted 1 year, 4 months ago 12 Responses

  • BP = Blatant Propaganda...

    ...at least that's what I always understood it to mean.  :-)

    Though you never know.  In Australia, BP plasters the following on public buses:  powered by carbon-neutral fuel ("Talk has long since stopped")On Did we say 'beyond petroleum'? posted 1 year, 9 months ago 4 Responses

  • criteria for green jobs

    Great to see this piece by Kevin Doyle.  He poses the right question by asking what green jobs really mean.  For all the (justified) excitement about this phenomenon, there is a bit of a danger that green jobs will suffer the fate of sustainable development: namely that it means all kinds of things to different people, and that certain interested parties (corporations, governments, etc.) may claim some jobs to be green that are anything but.

    So, other than the challenge of actually creating lots of green jobs, there is the tremendous task of coming up with a meaningful definition.  That's not a matter of semantics.  Rather, we need to develop some criteria by which we can make a reasonable judgment.

    This is relatively easy when it comes to jobs in the renewable energy sector:  jobs in wind and solar are an obvious choice for the green category.

    It's far more difficult with regard to biofuels, where there's now a raging debate about the pluses and minuses of this energy source.

    It gets even more difficult when we talk about the  field of energy efficiency.  What is sufficiently efficient to be called green?

    Finally, in all the excitement over green jobs, lets not forget that there are important social aspects.  A green job is not particularly great if it offers poor pay or working conditions, or if unionization is suppressed.
    On How do we define the green-job economy? posted 1 year, 9 months ago 3 Responses

  • before we point fingers ...

    It's rather revealing that a diminutive Indian car is garnering such attention from Western environmentalists. (Full disclosure: I'm part of the latter group.)

    Let's review some basics:  The Nano is said to have a fuel economy rating of 54 miles per gallon (though, of course, we all know there are many different test cycles, and it remains to be seen whether this rating holds up). The 54 mpg is roughly double the current US CAFE average.

    Indians on average drive one-fourth the distance that Americans drive in a year.

    The Nano seats five and Indian motor vehicles are typically used to full capacity, and then some.  The average number of occupants per car in the US is something like 1.4.

    Put all of this together and you end up with a factor of about 29--the average US car is likely to consume 29 times the energy of a Nano.

    Yes, there is disturbing strength in numbers: assuming that millions of Nanos may ultimately be sold, they will have a major impact in terms of carbon emissions.  And Indian cities hardly need more vehicles on their roads (it's already enough traffic chaos and air pollution).

    But as Westerners, perhaps we ought to focus our energies on changing our own massively  destructive car habits (people in Western countries plus Japan own two thirds of the world's motor vehicles) before pointing a finger at Indians.On Tata Motors unveils world's cheapest car in India posted 1 year, 10 months ago 16 Responses