Green Jobs

Ontario’s Green Energy Act has not been passed yet, but I hope it will be. It would go a long way in protecting the environment while reducing unemployment. The legislation says it will create around 50,000 jobs, primarily in the fields of engineering, construction, architecture, and related areas, with the Act’s expansion of public transportation and its plan to retrofit a great number of buildings to increase energy efficiency. This comfortable relationship between the goals of job creation and environment protection wasn’t always so; for quite a while, it was taken as self-evident that they were mutually exclusive and that the promotion of one inevitably brought the other’s weakening.

A very recent issue of The Nation (the ultra-progressive American weekly) published a piece by Robert Pollin, a professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts and co-author of Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy. He defends something like the American version of Ontario’s Green Energy Act. His Green Investment Agenda – the attempt to improve energy efficiency; increase access to renewable energy resources; and limit the use of dirty fuels – should also raise the prospects of the unemployed since, he argues, a $1-million investment in Green-jobs, such as building retrofitting, the creation of “smart grids” (a system that should make it easier and more efficient to harness renewable sources of power), will create about seventeen jobs; while the same investment in the coal and oil industry would create only about 5.5 jobs. If we can one day manage to trade in our current system, fueled by oil and coal, for a cleaner and more sustainable one, we will find ourselves with not just a more pleasant environment but with a greater number of jobs, in more diverse fields. As Pollin puts it

“If we allow that every $1 million in new green investments will be matched by an equal fall in spending within the fossil fuel industry, we will still net about 11.5 jobs each time $1 million transfers from fossil fuels to clean energy (i.e., seventeen jobs for green investments minus 5.5 lost in oil, natural gas and coal).”

Our public officials need to act now before we find ourselves past the tipping point. It’ll be a lot of work, but we have no other option at this point.

Let’s hope the Green Energy Act passes undiluted. It’s a start.