Obama Administration Needs Evidence of Green Jobs Growth

President Obama visited the manufacturing facilities of LED-maker Cree (Nasdaq: CREE) on Monday to talk about green job growth.

By the White House’s figures, $80 billion in the economic stimulus package created or preserved 225,000 clean energy jobs through Q310.

But despite moderate gains, the administration is so far unable to point to significant evidence that the nation is on track to the 5 million green collar workers hoped for within a decade. 

The president says the efficient lighting industry is one sector in which these green jobs will continue to grow, and he urges patience noting – as he has many times in the past – that economic recovery does not happen over night. 

Nonetheless, if the public doesn’t see evidence of economic  growth, they could give Republicans control of the White House in 2012, according to a Politico story.

This is despite the fact that Republicans have worked to undermine the majority of clean energy initiatives proposed by the Obama administration.

We’ve reported on the many ways Republicans are undermining economic growth through clean energy: eliminating the remaining stimulus funds that haven’t been spent (the funds were intentionally spread out over several years to keep the economic recovery going); making it near impossible for the EPA to regulate emissions; pushing back on fuel economy standards, and on and on.

They’re even pushing legislation to repeal the 2007 law that requires incandescent light bulbs to be 30% more energy efficient starting in 2012, which would boost employment in the lighting/green building sectors, in addition to cutting energy costs and reducing emissions.

Perhaps that’s why the Bureau of Labor Statistics is working on its first-ever study of the green collar job workforce. The agency is surveying 333 employment categories that either produce green goods and services or make traditional production processes greener. The survey will look at a wide range of jobs, from vineyard workers to steel mill operators and environmental journalists.

There is no timeline for publication of the report, but ideally it will come out – with glowing figures – before the 2012 elections.

Better Buildings, Better Jobs

A group of nonprofits is doing its part to add to the quanitification of the green jobs market.

An analysis shows that more than 114,000 new jobs would be created through the Better Buildings Initiative, the White House plan to make existing commercial and multifamily buildings more energy efficient.

Many of the jobs would come from the hard-hit construction industry, according to estimates released by the Real Estate Roundtable, the U.S. Green Building Council, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

This key initiative, announced by President Obama in February, combines financial and other incentives to improve energy efficiency in the nation’s commercial and multifamily buildings stock.

The biggest job driver in the Better Buildings Initiative, which accounts for over 77,000 of the new jobs, is a redesigned tax deduction for energy efficiency upgrades of buildings.

The analysis shows how the initiative would have a positive rippling effect throughout the economy to generate more manufacturing, production, and service jobs – and demonstrates how public funds can leverage significant private investments to expand the benefits to the economy.

"This Obama Initiative works for our economy in two important ways: it helps create tens of thousands of good-paying jobs while making us more energy efficient," says the Roundtable’s CEO and President, Jeffrey DeBoer. "Unemployment in the construction sector continues to hover above 16%. Lending is still difficult to come by in many markets, so financial incentives like these proposed by the White House will leverage private investment to help propel our cities and suburbs forward into a new energy economy."

"The Better Buildings Initiative will achieve multiple benefits with an amplifying effect – first and foremost, the initiative will create green jobs," says Roger Platt, Senior Vice President of Global Policy & Law with the U.S. Green Building Council. "This program will also lower energy consumption, reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign oil and allow America to retain its competitive edge in the international marketplace as a leader in constructing, retrofitting and operating high-performing buildings."

Economic Recovery vs Austerity

Republicans swept back into office on state and federal levels at least partly because they said they’d focus on job creation. Since they’ve gotten in, however, their focus has been on shrinking the deficit through decreased spending to fulfill their ideology of a small government (while eliminating social programs they don’t believe in).

Shrinking government spending and reducing government jobs by the hundreds of thousands doesn’t revive an economy coming out of a deep recession. It logically leads to greater unemployment – which we are seeing now – the result is a very sluggish economy, which could ironically cost Obama the 2012 election.

Regardless of your opinion of former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, he captures the problems of fiscal austerity while coming out of a recession in a Financial Times editorial, "How We Can Avoid Stumbling Into Our Own Lost Decade."

"While US politicians (and politicians everywhere) emphasize the ‘costs’ of sustaining aggregate demand via higher government spending (on the spurious grounds that such spending creates the possibility of ‘national insolvency’), they ignore the fact that there are huge daily losses in foregone income, corporate tax revenues and output. These are accumulating daily as we economically chase our own tail.

The losses engendered by high unemployment will never be regained and the longer we persist with economic bloodletting, the greater will be the damage to the economy for years ahead.

Spending creates income which supports employment growth. Shrinking a fiscal deficit is virtually synonymous with shrinking economic growth.  If the fiscal consolidation is ambitious enough, it can deliver an outright recession.

Cutting corporate taxes (a lot of which aren’t paid in any case), he says, will not solve the problem of an economy characterized by lack of demand. There is little point, for example, in offering a slew of new investment or R&D tax credits if businesses can’t sell the goods subsequently produced.

Once firms realize they have over-produced, output starts to fall. Firms lay-off workers and the loss of income starts to multiply as those workers reduce their spending elsewhere. At that point, the economy is heading for a recession.

For those who are motivated by a dogmatic belief in small government, it is also worth noting that blind adherence to fiscal austerity actually helps to defeat that very policy purpose. There is a very strong negative association between public expenditure and the public debt, excluding the outliers of the two world wars of last century. Generally speaking, as public expenditure increases, public debt falls, and vice versa. Government spending increases GDP growth faster than the debt increases."

++++

Our Green Dream Jobs service has been connecting people with sustainable jobs since 1996. Take a look: