Green Jobs

Would you rather have a cleaner world or a better economy with more people working? In a perfect world you would be able to choose both. According to H. Sterling Burnett and James Franko, if the U.S were to add "green collar" jobs it would result in many more lost. 

Spain. President Obama has identified Spain as a model for a new economy driven by green jobs. But a 2009 study from Madrid's King Juan Carlos University showed that for every green job the Spanish government created, 2.2 jobs were lost as energy-intensive industries either closed down or moved to other countries with lower energy costs:

• The government's green job push created approximately 50,000 jobs, but resulted in a loss of more than 110,000 jobs in other industries.
• Only 1 in 10 of the new green jobs was permanent.
• Each green job created since 2000 has required about $774,000 in government subsidies. [See the figure.]

These statistics look really bad for the economy, but energy-efficient technology is CRITICAL if we want to keep living on this earth. If every industry switched over to being green then there wouldn't be many job losses, just less pollution and energy consumption. The United States government needs to thoroughly think through how they can make things green without getting rid of so many jobs but I believe it is possible. 

http://i.huffpost.com/

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, popularly known as the stimulus bill, has produced few if any green jobs so far. For instance, Indiana set a goal to weatherize 25,000 existing homes over three years in order to increase energy efficiency. Yet, according to the Washington Post, only 82 homes had been retrofitted as of November 2009 and no jobs had been created. In Virginia, stimulus spending was so slow that most of the work has been done by existing employees, rather than new workers.

This bill is obviously not going as well as people expected. This may be because their is no motivation to make it happen, or maybe because their is not enough funding. I think it would be more successful if people actually cared about it, or thought it was very important. There needs to be more thought and effort into weatherizing homes and creating other energy efficient things. 

Source: http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba702