Thursday, December 2, 2010

Where are the Green Jobs you've been hearing so much about?

Here's a good article about the challenges to growing the number of green jobs -- underfunding, no cap-and-trade bill or carbon tax to put a high price on carbon, and outsourcing of production to other countries.


Green Job Search | The American Prospect:
By Monica Potts
November 8, 2010

"...The $500 million for green jobs provided by the stimulus, along with a host of state grants, is going to training programs, but not enough financing is going to the struggling companies that will one day employ the graduates of those programs. Of the oft-cited $90 billion in the Recovery Act devoted to 'clean energy,' less than a third went directly to renewable-energy generation. And solar and wind projects had to split that amount with more established and less environmentally friendly industries like hydropower and biofuels. Much of the direct grant money for non-research projects comes from a program scheduled to end in January that allows companies to trade future tax credits for cash now."

"The unfulfilled promise of stable, well-paying green jobs is probably best represented by the wind turbine: The United States has the capacity to both build the turbines in unused factories and get as much as 30 percent of our power from wind -- but we aren't doing either..."

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