Good News: Green Jobs Growing!
By Christa
Green jobs are growing – at a rate twice that of all jobs overall – even though the larger job market is nothing if not worrying at the moment. And that’s pretty sweet, because it means green technology is boomin’ and us U.S.ians are this much closer to staying ahead in the global economy. Sounds like good news all around! What and where are these green jobs, you may ask? Not surprising, most are in the field of green energy, but there are also plenty of jobs in agriculture and transportation and manufacturing can be green, too.
How do you get in on the ground floor if you’re not in one of the aforementioned industries? Be in Michigan, for one, where green jobs are growing the fastest. Try the Green Jobs Network. And then, as necessary, find some educational opportunities!
According to Stephen J. Lynch, Senior Project Manager at Jobs for the Future, the nation’s community colleges are ”the speed-boats of workforce training” because of the ways they can adapt curricula and training design more quickly than traditional four-year institutions.
“Today’s job-seekers, particularly laid off adults, seek training that is accessible, low-cost, and that offers the chance to obtain employment as quickly as possible,” he told us. He goes on to note that Jobs for the Future helps community colleges produce workers with the skills, degrees and certifications that are in-demand by today’s employers by helping them to present course content within a real-world context and modularize training with stackable credentials.
But watch out! Green jobs are still at risk, especially since there are still scores of people who’d like to see green energy and green building initiatives fail. What’s funny about that – in a sad way, mind – is that the growing green job market in the U.S. tends to be homegrown, but green energy opponents like to shout about how green energy is a U.S. job killer.
Meanwhile, it is well established that labor-intensive investments in solar, wind and increased building efficiency create far more jobs than similar investments in fossil fuels. These technologies will most likely go down in cost while fossil prices will only go up long-term. And with a renewable energy economy, there is no cost of fuel or fuel price volatility. Imagine that.
Imagine that, indeed.
March 1st, 2011 at 7:28 am
I hope this is true, especially when we’re talking about restoring the right to good, real, fresh food is concerned. I think that if we were to focus on just adding green industry to the economy we could have the whole massive worldwide unemployment problem licked in no time. All we’d have to do then is put some restraints on the frauds running the whole banking industry and we’d all be thriving.
But the politics are the problem. The green industry isn’t new–it is decades old and everyone who is still in it from way back has seen this whole scenario before. It is difficult to face the reality that so much of the effort to make real change on a lasting level has been almost impossible. In North America, all it takes is an election to start or stop funding immediately, and right now, politicians are enacting legislation because it brings them personal profit, not because it’s the wrong or right thing to do. That’s a tremendous hurdle to making this cultural and economic change. When it becomes unprofitable to subsidize all the ecological threats in the world–such as the militias and all the weaponry manufacturing it depends on (the US Army is the world’s largest ecological threat), big oil, big pharma, and big biotech–then people will begin to provide permanent support for the green technology that has really been around for ages, gathering dust because until the subsidies shift, much of that technology will be inaccessible to us.
March 1st, 2011 at 9:18 pm
Nah, China gives them tax subsides and we call them job killers.
March 2nd, 2011 at 3:12 pm
But isn’t the main problem that the infrastructure for oil, etc. is already in place, so overall cheaper in the short term? A lot of these green industries require up front capital to get rolling and what happens when that cash isn’t there (related to the funding issues mentioned above)? No green industry means no green jobs. Where are the incentives – how can we incentivize this?