The difficulty of green job promotion
Since its inception, the environmental movement has largely defined itself against corporate exploitation, and supported ecological integrity even in the face of economic opposition. Nowhere has more been at stake in this historical confrontation between environmental and economic interests than in the politics of energy and global climate change. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that carbon emissions must be drastically curtailed to avoid catastrophic warming, but the economic costs of the transition, especially in an economic downturn, are substantial enough to present significant political obstacles to action.
Over the last year and a half, environmental advocates have shifted their rhetoric away from regulation as a necessary medicine towards a new, omnipresent term: “green jobs.” The rhetoric of the green economy has saturated political dialogue for good reason. The argument made by proponents of green jobs is a win-win-win: fix unemployment, protect the environment, and establish American competitiveness in a rapidly growing international market. Even in a time of economic crisis, who can disagree with such a proposal? Yet the evidence suggests that “green jobs” has become a hollow political catchphrase, a supposedly economic and environmental boon that could end up as neither. Unless legislation is carefully crafted, its overly optimistic proponents could provoke a backlash against the larger environmental movement and complicate efforts to tackle climate change.
Shades of Green (Jobs)
Of course, effective green job promotion can bring substantial benefits. In an interview with the HPR, Dr. Benjamin Sovacool, a professor at the National University of Singapore, pointed out that renewable energy deployment saves money. It eliminates pollution, reduces dependence on foreign sources of energy, and diversifies the energy mix, which shields the economy against oil and natural gas price fluctuations. Once clean energy systems are in place, they offer innumerable benefits.
Transitioning to a green economy, however, requires more than just wind turbines. Problems with building transmission lines can delay projects for years, making it difficult for clean energy projects to operate within the short timeframe demanded by a stimulus package. As Chris Cooper, former Executive Director of the Network for New Energy Choices, lamented to the HPR, the “regulatory morass” surrounding the permitting process, driven by intractable state-federal power struggles over jurisdiction, is the “greatest enemy of renewable energy” and often matters more than the existence of subsidies.
These difficulties highlight the need for specific, context-dependent policy. Efficiency projects, such as weatherization (retrofitting buildings to save energy), net an economic return of about “seven dollars for every one dollar invested,” according to Sovacool, but the benefits of other green job strategies are more difficult to measure. Even Robert Pollin of the Political Economy Research Institute — one of the most committed defenders of green job promotion — conceded to the HPR that, “For the next five years, most of the investments in clean energy should be efficiency measures.” Government legislation must find some way to account for distinctions among green jobs, since their quality is far more important than their quantity.
Green, but Economically Efficient?
The reality, unfortunately, is that most green jobs are ambiguous: they can consist of anything from insulating homes to save energy to research and development for the next generation of solar panels. The breadth of the category complicates government intervention, since defining green jobs becomes entangled in political interests. When asked by the HPR to define green jobs, Benjamin Lieberman, a senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said they were “best described as politically correct jobs.” While President Obama’s stimulus package, passed in February, included about $68 billion for clean energy, it has had difficulty creating new green jobs and achieving immediate, tangible results.
Green jobs are economically ambiguous as well. According to Robert Michaels, economics professor at CSU Fullerton and a senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research, the debate over green jobs underscores the “desperate need for journalists to get some basic training in economics.” Michaels explained to the HPR that doling out stimulus dollars is particularly tricky because jobs are fungible. Since the unemployment market is transient and heterogeneous, new government-created jobs can easily end up being given to already-employed workers who switch over from the private sector, which would leave unemployment rates unaffected.
Michael’s analysis mirrors Leiberman’s research for the Heritage Foundation, which found that a green government stimulus would have a net “adverse impact on jobs.” One of the few empirical studies of green job promotion in Spain, conducted by Dr. Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor at Juan Carlos University in Madrid, discovered that every one green job created came at the cost of 2.2 other jobs. More optimistic studies on green jobs, Lieberman argued, tend to forget that they are created with taxpayer dollars and at the expense of private capital that is “siphoned off from the rest of the economy.”
Furthermore, since no alternative energy source can yet compete with conventional energy generation on an open market, government-led green job creation involves prioritizing certain technologies over others, an approach which risks wasting tax dollars on ineffective solutions. In the words of Michaels, the government has always been “absolutely lousy” at picking winners, and “there’s no reason to expect” that future legislation will be any different. Immediate green job creation can even stifle renewable energy innovation by artificially locking in technologies that are more efficient today, such as wind energy, but have less future potential.
Getting Back to Basics
Significantly, all of the experts seem aware of the absence of any consensus over green jobs or energy policy. Contradicting interests — environmentalists, fossil fuel companies, nuclear providers, NGOs, green technology businesses — make directly conflicting studies almost inevitable. As Sovacool concluded, energy policy is “one of the most highly politicized areas”; waiting for everyone to agree on a policy will only ensure inaction. For this reason, as professor Robert Stavins, director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, explained to the HPR, a green stimulus is at its heart a “symbolic policy,” rather than a substantial response to global warming.
The economics of green jobs remains mired in ambiguity, but environmentalists should not treat that uncertainty as a devastating blow to their agenda. Indeed, the green movement cannot take a chance with global warming legislation by framing it as a solution to economic woes as well as environmental ones. To do so and fail would merely give more ammunition to those who already oppose climate regulation. Especially with pivotal climate talks in Copenhagen in December, environmental activists should stick to what they know best, the widely agreed-upon science and consequences of climate change, rather than dabbling in murky questions of economics. Green jobs can serve as a potential spin-off of climate policy, but never as its central justification, which must remain fundamentally environmental.
Image Credit: Greenforall.org (Flickr)
