Two Million New Jobs From a $100B Green Investment?
According to a sweeping report released by the Center for American Progress and authored by researchers from the UMass Department of Economics, if the US government were to invest $100 billion dollars over two years in six key areas of green and sustainable development — including advanced biofuels — the result would be the creation of 2 million high-paying jobs across nearly all sectors of employment.
This represents four times the amount of jobs that would be created if that same $100 billion were invested in the oil industry for things like more offshore drilling. It also represents significantly more jobs of much higher diversity, pay, and longevity than were created by the $100 billion spent last April so that all us ‘mericans could all get our $600 tax rebates.
Granted, there is no plan to provide such a large investment to the oil industry, but, nonetheless, they already receive an average of $9 billion dollars a year in subsidies and incentives (PDF), so I believe it is a fair comparison — especially with all this hoo-haa being stirred up about “Drill, baby, drill” and other such stupid catchphrases.
In addition to the creation of 2 million new high-paying jobs, the report points out that:
Currently, about 22% of total household expenditures go to imports. With a green infrastructure investment program, only about 9% of purchases flow to imports since so much of the investment is rooted in communities and the built environment, keeping more of the resources within the domestic economy.
In plain speak this means that under this green recovery program, we would stop shipping a large portion of our hard-earned cash to China and the Middle East to buy cheap crap and fund governments who could care less about the average American, and start spending it domestically. On top of that, the process would revitalize our disappearing rural areas and small towns.
The following table is reproduced directly from the report and shows the vast array of different jobs created by investing the the six key areas of green development.
The report also contains state-by-state breakdowns of economic impact as well as very detailed discussions of how they came to their conclusions and what calculations they used. Check it out for further information. To me it seems like a very solid argument and excellent presentation of the data.
Posts Related to Green Investment in The Transportation Future:
- 5 Reasons Why Oil Will Not Be the Wedge Issue Republicans Want it to Be
- Poll: Americans Don’t Think More Drilling Will Lower Gas Prices
- Environmental Defense Fund: New Offshore Drilling in Perspective (Cool Graph)
- US Will Export $440 Billion For Oil In 2008
- Diversifying America’s Transportation Portfolio: A “Green Deal”
- U.S. Gasoline Still Among World’s Cheapest
- New Fiesta Gets 73 MPG, But Ford Says It’s Not For The U.S.
- Changing Locomotion in Midstream: California’s Ethanol Mandate (Part 3)
Image Credit: Center for American Progress
Source: Biofuels Digest
What this really points to is a dire need for a consortium of green energy companies to lobby the Feds HARD to make this investment happen. I think they could make a serious case for such an investment if they could come up with a realistic way to apportion this investment. None of this “$50 billion for new battery research” to a single organization. No, there should be a way to apportion this investment to all the promising technologies we’ve read about here in this blog. Right now the only consortiums I’ve heard about are technoology-specific, like ethanol producers. But we need ethanol, biodiesel, wind, solar, and a few others to push together on this issue.
As this piece makes clear, green jobs come from green investments. Anyone interested in looking at green investing will m=find my site worthwhile. It covers the latest global news and research on green-ethical investing. It’s at http://investingforthesoul.com/
Best wishes, Ron Robins
Wind is awesome and solar is too, but they have not mentioned anything about geothermal. Geothermal is not finicky about whether the wind blows or the sun shines. It will work 24/7, and there are no major hurtles to overcome.
Where is that $100 billion going to come from? I know they don’t have it and they won’t make any cuts because of it. It sounds like good news for those who need jobs, but it will hurt the rest who have jobs. Some will see their income rise but some won’t and the prices of everything will be rising from the new influx of capital.
I think I feel a Green bubble coming on…