Global Green Jobs

By Jason Walsh and Sarah White, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted May 28, 2008.

"Green-collar jobs" are a hot topic these days. This is good news, certainly, for those who seek to alter our present course toward climate catastrophe. Greater awareness of the promise of a green economy allows us to challenge the too-familiar framing of "jobs vs. the environment" that has defeated so many attempts at environmental protection. Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire tapped into the power of reframing with the Climate Action and Green Jobs Bill, which combines a framework to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with a green jobs initiative. After she announced it in her 2008 budget request, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's headline read: "Gov. Gregoire announces bill to fight climate change, create jobs."

Such reframing will be key to the coming fights over legislation to cap and reduce carbon emissions in this country and the international negotiations over a successor to the Kyoto climate accords. Certainly, we can expect the arguments of opponents that any serious attempt to reduce carbon emissions will cripple the global economy. (We'll need to resist the satisfying yet insufficient response that in the absence of such an attempt unregulated financial markets seem to be doing that job just fine).

Our counter-argument will have to begin with the increasingly apparent point that the global economy will be devastated by doing nothing. The Stern Review released in 2006 by Sir Nicholas Stern, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, estimated that the cost of extreme weather events could reach 0.5-1% of GDP by the middle of the century. An increase in temperature of 2 to 3 degree Celsius could reduce global production by 3%.

But it won't be enough to summarize the escalating depredations of the devil we are coming increasingly to know. We'll need to show convincing evidence that green jobs hold enormous promise for significant employment domestically and globally; and that this promise will be unfulfilled if we do not make a decisive shift to a clean energy economy.

Employment Opportunity

In the United States, green-collar jobs offer new opportunity for low-income and working-class people who have been at the short end of persistent and increasing inequality in this country. Despite significant boosts in worker productivity over recent decades, median wages remain stagnant. The decline in manufacturing jobs over the last decade gathered steam with an 18% national job loss after the 2001 recession, plummeting with particularly devastating consequences in the industrial heartland, which bore up to a third of the national job loss recorded between 2000 and 2005. Nationally, median family income has not recovered to the pre-recession levels of 2000, and job insecurity threatens workers at all levels. This trend toward greater inequality, wage stagnation, job loss and insecurity stems from many factors, not least economic and trade policies that have encouraged offshoring, real and threatened, and wage triage on a global scale.

The new energy economy will not solve all of the problems of economic inequality, environmental degradation, and energy insecurity. But it can contribute mightily to a resurgence of the American middle class and a sustainable environmental ethos. By expanding existing industries and creating new ones, the emerging green sector can retain and create significant numbers of domestic jobs.

What are these green-collar jobs? We define the core of this sector as family-supporting, middle-skill jobs, most of them in the primary sectors of a clean energy economy -- efficiency, renewables, and alternative transportation and fuels. There are many ways to count them, none perfect. One respected source, using a broad set of parameters, estimates that the renewable and efficiency sectors may account for as many as 1 in 4 jobs by 2030. (This projection includes both the full range of jobs in these industries -- from accountants to mechanics -- and those created indirectly by them.) Whatever the relative merits of such approximations, even the most modest modeling indicates that the green economy holds much promise for urban and rural revitalization.

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Jason Walsh is National Policy Director for Green For All. Sarah White is a Senior Policy Associate with the Center on Wisconsin Strategy. Both are contributors to Foreign Policy In Focus.