Solar photovoltaic installer is the fastest growing job category in America. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is expecting 105 percent growth in jobs installing solar panels, both in large power plants and on the roofs of homes and businesses, between now and 2026. The only other job that comes anywhere close to 100 percent growth in the next seven years is wind turbine service technician, which can expect 96 percent growth in its ranks, according to the bureau, the non-partisan federal measurer of the economy. New technology is making “alternative” fuels a lot less alternative and experimental. They are becoming much more economically viable competitors to established fossil fuels by making their cleaner transportation and manufacturing methods cheaper and more reliable all the time. Meanwhile, the effects of traditional fossil-fuel generation and the resulting global warming – more frequent and intense storms, heat waves, dissolving coral reefs, faster species extinction, dying eco systems and rising sea levels – have become harder to ignore and harder to deny.
But if the United States moves from a traditional, polluting economy to a “green” economy – based on solar and wind production, recycling and ever more efficient and automated production methods – will we be able to produce enough jobs to replace dirty ones? The short answer is probably yes. But whether we can continue to produce enough jobs to sustain the economy in the long term and whether we can transition fast enough to avoid the worst possible effects of climate change is much more complicated.
“If we take a time range of the last ten years, the transition has been quite dramatically fast, I would say,” Philip Jordan of BW Research said. “It’s been a very rapid transition, which is really evidenced by large growth in construction-related jobs in clean energy technologies and energy efficiency.”
A little more than 60 percent of American solar power is generated at utility-sale power plants, according to the 2019 U.S. Energy and Employment Report, which BW Research has helped conduct ever since it was part of the Department of Energy’s assessments. But interestingly, they make up less than a quarter of U.S. photovoltaic capacity. Nearly 20 percent of that comes from solar panels on private homes and about a nearly a fifth again comes from commercial buildings.
“Certain long term trends accelerated, such as the continuing growth of the natural gas electric power generation and wind workforces, as the cost advantage pushed out older coal-fired units,” The report said in its conclusion. “Investments in energy infrastructure continued to grow in 2018 with the number of construction companies reporting a majority of their revenues coming from utility investments increasing with an accompanying dramatic increase in construction jobs.”
There have been twice as many jobs created in the solar industry than the coal industry since 2017. While solar power only accounts for about two percent of the power we use, the number of solar jobs is steadily growing while coal is steadily declining in both jobs and the amount of energy we use.
Natural gas added 17,000 jobs during the study’s lifetime, or about 6.8 percent, about half as much as the 33,500 new jobs in the petroleum industry, which grew by 5.9 percent.
The Solar Foundation, an advocacy group for the industry, say that over a quarter of a million people were employed in the solar industry in 2017. A 3.8 percent decline in solar jobs that year was the first time that the solar job market constricted since their Solar Jobs Census was started in 2010. There was also a decline in 2018, partially due to the trade war the Trump administration is waging with China.
Wind has been a much more unstable jobs creator. According to the St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve, full time wind turbine service technicians, for example, saw their ranks pogo jump from around 5,000 in 2014, to 3,000 or so in 2015, back to 5,000 in 2016, to 6,000 in 2017 and then 2,000 last year. Wind power jobs grew by six and a half percent from 2017 to 2018, according to the same report; it had gained six percent in the previous year.
Hydroelectric power employed 66,448 people. Biomass power employed 12,976.
When it came to “transportation, distribution and storage”, the report found that 48 percent of employers “reported that a majority of their revenues come from grid modernization or other utility-funded modernization projects, an increase of 10 percentage points over 2017.”
About half of the 2.35 million Americans involved in energy efficiency were in the construction industry, which saw 3.4 percent job growth in 2019, according to the USEER. BLS has found that green jobs – like insectary manager, recycling coordinator and solar panel installer – are growing, some of them are simply green versions of jobs that have existed for generations. With wind for example, the jobs include machinists, assemblers, welders, and quality control inspectors – all jobs that we already have, they’re just making another product.
“There’s also the factor of the efficiencies of scale,” Steve Valk, director of communications at Citizens Climate Lobby, an advocacy organization lobbying for action on climate policy, said. “The more you make of something, the more the per unit cost comes down on something. So not only is [alternative] technology getting better and more efficient, it’s also getting cheaper.”
These jobs may also include energy distribution systems, transition lines, pipelines, utility scale solar power plants and wind turbine plants and natural gas plants. Construction of these systems, and the maintenance of them, energy researchers say, will provide a large portion of jobs in creating a carbon-neutral economy.
“It’s mighty hard to build a humongous wind turbine blade, or a wind tower overseas and ship it to America. It just doesn’t make cost sense. A lot of that is made domestically,” Bob Keefe, the Executive Director at the Energy Entrepreneurs – a non-profit that advocates for economic growth and economic stewardship, said.
Solar panel installers only make $39,490 per year and wind turbine service technicians get $53,880 per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But while coal advocates say that coal jobs provide much more income for workers when you factor in all of the benefits that a coal mining union can provide, the simple fact is that the net number of jobs in the coal industry can plateau at best, whereas solar panel installers and wind turbine service technicians are predicted to double in number. The coal mining industry gained just 650 jobs last year, according to the 2019 USEER.
The problem, Jordan explained, is that while it will take decades of effort to create a green economy, it’s not clear where the jobs will come from once that is accomplished. “Getting there definitely will create lots of jobs,” He added. “The jobs that exist after construction are far fewer, for some technologies more than others.”
This year’s USEER report was created partly by the Energy Futures Initiative, a Washington D.C.-based organization that advocates for a transition in the public and private spheres to a green economy, and the National Association of State Energy Officials, a non-profit organizations that “advocates the interests of state energy offices to Congress and federal agencies.” This report was published partly by the Department of Energy until recently. They took over creating this report because the Trump administration has spent its first two years ignoring or attempting to challenge climate change science.
David Foster was the senior advisor for industrial and economic policy in the federal Department of Energy from 2014 to 2017, before joining the Energy Futures Initiative. Foster said that while all types of power extraction and generation provide construction jobs, traditional energy sources will provide a large number of jobs over the “life of the asset” while alternative energies provide a lot of jobs during construction, but comparatively few during most of the life of the project.
“The growth of the solar industry in the preceding decade produces a lot of jobs on the front end, in construction, but they don’t provide jobs that maintain themselves over the life time of a given worker in a particular geography,” Foster said.
It will take an army of workers decades to build enough solar to power the country, but the growth is there. The Department of Energy has estimated that “wind could provide up to 20 percent of the United States’ electricity mix by 2030 and 35 percent by 2050.” The problem is that although that could provide enough jobs for a generation, once they’re built, it will only take a fraction of them to maintain the system.
So yes, a green economy – where the means of production, distribution, and transportation are produced with no pollution or emission of greenhouse gasses – can provide enough jobs for a generation. But after that, the economy will have to adapt again.
In other words, the era of the Green New Deal is not unlike that of any other period in the economic history of capitalism. Markets go up and down, competition breeds innovation and old jobs – like coal mining and oil refining – become obsolete in the wake of new careers – like installing solar panels and creating biofuels – which will themselves, become obsolete or niche jobs in the future. This won’t provide enough jobs for everyone forever. But no economic cycle or industry can either.
Meanwhile, states that are thinking ahead with green jobs – like California and North Carolina – are going to see the benefits of green jobs first. States that are dragging their feet, or trying to swim against the current of technological change, are going to have to adapt eventually. Especially when there isn’t enough demand left in early adopter states to keep building more efficient technology, and the other states become the only place left to go.
It is also a mistake to think that the Earth will literally run out of every drop of oil and last ounce of coal one day. But the day is coming when the cost of extracting it will be so great that the economics of the power source that made the Industrial Revolution possible will simply not make dollars and cents sense any more.
“One of the things that’s needed to replace fossil fuels in the energy mix is storage – that’s always been one of the stumbling blocks with using wind and solar – the sun isn’t shinning or if the wind isn’t blowing, you’re not producing electricity and therefore we have to have ways to store energy when it is being produced. So that way we can distribute it later on. So I think one of the things you’re going to see is jobs being created in the future are going to be for better technologies to store energy,” Valk said. “Right now we have battery technology, but it’s sort of like the original cell phones in the 80s, that look like bricks. There’s a lot that can be done to make this technology smaller and less expensive. I think that’s probably one of the areas where you’re going to see more jobs coming up.”
The St. Louis Federal Reserve found that coal jobs went from accounting for nearly 180,000 jobs in the 1980s to around 52,700 jobs recently.
“The bottom line is the technology doesn’t make sense anymore,” Keefe said. “If you talk to any utility executive around this country, they’re not investing in new coal plants. Why is that? Because wind is the cheapest energy source on the market right now and solar is the second cheapest. Natural gas, of course, is still huge and among the cheapest sources of energy out there. But in a lot of markets, all around the country, solar and wind is as cheap, if not cheaper.”
While coal mining regulations have been rolled back, coal mine jobs are not rematerializing as President Trump promised they would. Phil Smith, director of communications and governmental affairs at the United Mine Workers of America – a labor union representing miners – said that jobs have increased in Wyoming, but not Appalachia. Strip mining and automation have greatly reduced the numbers needed to mine coal, while at the same time the demand for coal is winding down.
“On the usage end of coal, we can develop technologies that allow us to continue using coal to generate electricity in a carbon neutral way. I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions out there. It’s been a well-funded campaign, to make coal a dirty word. But the fact of the matter it doesn’t have to be,” Smith said. He said carbon capture “is the way forward.”
Carbon Capture is basically a process in which fossil fuels are burned to create energy, but their emissions are captured and stored somewhere, so most of the carbon doesn’t contribute to climate change, even though fossil fuel is still being burned. Smith insists that the coal jobs that are left are better jobs for the workers than the alternatives and that coal mining and usage can be done safely if the law is followed properly.
“Development of carbon capture and storage technology in this country, and around the world, is vital to significantly reduce greenhouse gasses globally – you can’t really do it without that,” Smith said, adding that “it will allow for the continuation of thousands upon thousands of jobs in this country and elsewhere. I couldn’t tell you how many, or quantify that. But our interest is in preserving as many jobs as we possibly can for our members.”
Petroleum is still the largest U.S. energy employer overall, with over half a million jobs. The latest emerging fossil fuel, natural gas, has just over 300,000 employees; more than all green power sources put together. But green jobs are not just about solar and wind. They will be concentrated in factories and mines, but will tend to be more spread out.
Jobs like the ones Derek Lirange and Ruth Seward of the Worcester Tree Initiative do in Worcester, Massachusetts. This local initiative was formed in 2008 after an invasive species of beetles infected the trees around the mid-size New England city. Around 30,000 trees had to be torn out and replaced. The urban forestry jobs that resulted only created a pair of full time jobs, but Seward and Lirange say they use volunteers and temporary employees in the summer.
“I sit on the Massachusetts State Tree Wardens Executive Board,” Seward said. “What I’m hearing is there’s a lot of need. They can’t fill the jobs in their municipalities for forestry positions. You don’t even need a high school degree to get a job as an entry-level forester. But then again, they need people who can map, track data and lead people. I think there’s room for both. Right now the way municipal employment works is: you may not get as much salary on the upstart, but a lot of these positions come with defined benefit questions, training that’s included, that seem to make things equal in terms of public sector versus private sector. I think it depends on the area. If you look at Worcester in particular, there have been a lot of jobs because we had a massive infestation.”
With fossil-fuel based power systems, the jobs were tied to a set of specific locations; coal and oil deposits were geographically fixed. But since wind turbines can be placed in far more spread out areas – from offshore wind farms off the coasts and great lakes, to the entirety of the great plains – the jobs are going to be dispersed. This both spreads out the possibility of new jobs around the country, and leaves places where the coal and oil used to be extracted facing either ruin or the necessity to adapt.
“It’s primarily the economics of it. Some of it has to do with the distributability of a resource in a given location certainly helps the resource in a given location,” David Foster said. Using solar as an example, “it certainly helps that the Southwest,” which has a big and growing utility-scale solar industry “is close to very large population centers with high energy demands.”
Of course, the United States is not an island in the world in anything, least of all climate change. China for example, produced twice as much CO2 emissions as the United States in 2014, according to the EPA. And now that President Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris Climate agreement, emissions have a chance to increase in 2018.
The United States can influence how much countries innovate by the sheer peer pressure of being the biggest economy in the world. But it can’t force less developing countries – which can argue that they need to prioritize economic growth over environmental health – to be green. But what the American government and businesses do have largely influenced what other countries’ corporations and governments have done.
“Policy matters. Policy is humongous, period. If you look at the growth in clean energy in the past few years, a lot of that has been driven from good federal policies,” Keefe said. He explained that federal policies on emissions and taxes have put renewables “on a more equal playing ground with the rest of the energy industry, which have gotten subsidies and tax breaks for close to the century now.”
So while the United States is not the sole superpower it once was, it is still very important. In any for any economic plan to be viable, the United States will have to get into line with the rest of the world to be viable in the long term, more so than other countries have had to adapt to be viable in the American market historically.
The Trump Administration ended funding for the U.S. energy and employment report when it came into office, and the president himself habitually calls climate change a “hoax.”
The Administration went into damage control mode around Christmas last year when around 300 experts from his own administration said that climate change was not only real, but poses a grave threat to the U.S. economy.
“The Trump administration has made a great deal of complexity and inefficiency in terms of how the motor vehicle industry thinks about its future,” Foster said. “Instead of standardizing, being able to create a few highly competitive platforms that can be sold to the markets all over the world, we’re now talking about dividing the United States itself up into two markets, one with the states that follow Californian fuel efficiency goals and another that are being made for the rest of the United States, but will have little applicability to the rest of the world.”
And the Trump Administration is proposing to cut even more science spending in its 2020 Budget Proposal, despite proposing to spend a whopping $4.7 trillion in total this year, while cutting $2.7 trillion worth of spending of the next decade. The $31.7 billion requested for the Department of Energy is 11 percent less than in the previous enacted budget.
An unspecified amount of money is being proposed to modernize the nuclear arsenal and increase the stockpile of weapons like the B61-12, a 50 kiloton yield nuclear missile.
The proposal does propose spending $6.5 billion to clean up 16 environmentally contaminated sites and $128 million.
Although the Department of Energy portion of the budget does call for $5 and a half billion for the Office of Science – a branch of the DOE which helps translate scientific discoveries into useable “energy, economic and national security” applications, half a billion for supercomputing and $118 million for 17 National Laboratories, it is still a massive cut to what has been spent previously.
The budget also proposes to “divest federally owned and operated transmission assets and authorize the power marketing administrations to charge market based rates for power,” meaning that the governments portions of the grid would be heading towards privatization. The last paragraph on page 38 explains “reducing or eliminating the federal government’s role in electricity transition infrastructure ownership, thereby increasing the private sector’s role, and introducing more market-based incentives …. would encourage a more efficient allocation of economic resources and mitigate rates to taxpayers.”
This Fourth National Climate Assessment’s Second Volume ends its summary of economic findings by saying “With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century – more than the current gross domestic product of many U.S. states.”
Even if the American public were to suddenly stop caring about climate change, or reverse course, the current fossil-fuel model is going to run out of steam sooner or later. President Trump has made himself the champion of coal from pretty much day one of his political career and keeps insisting that the industry is on its way back.
Trump ran his campaign on the commonly touted theory that crusading environmental rules created by former President Obama and other liberals constituted a “war on coal” aimed at destroying the industry. And while Obama’s administration did pursue lots of environmental regulations, the simple fact is that coal jobs have been going down in number steadily for decades.
Alternative energy is still not a silver bullet to combat climate change. Storing energy made by wind and solar sources when neither are Available is still a massive challenge. And even when the economy crosses the threshold from a carbon-based economy to a carbon-neutral one, it’s not clear if it will happen fast enough.
Climate chance scientist Katherine Hayhoe says that “once you talk for more than 30 seconds” to people she finds who deny the existence of climate change, it becomes clear “that they have solution aversion.”
This means that they have been trained to think from various sources that climate change and the solutions to it go against their values one way or another. Scientists, by nature, confine their arguments to the facts. But not everybody thinks like a scientist and when the scientific argument that you’re putting forward, and the solutions that you’re proposing, give people the impression that you’re threatening their world view, then they are naturally going to resist anything you say.
“As scientists we often don’t recognize that. So [we] just pile on more and more facts. And all that does is cause people to dig in deeper,” Hayhoe added.
Hayhoe is a professor at Texas Tech University, who has been educating the public about climate change for years. She says there is a definite shift where more and more people believe in the existence of man- made climate change, and see it is a problem. But it’s not clear if the resulting shift towards a clean economy is happening fast enough.
Thought patterns are reinforced by political persuasions and media echo chambers that people inhabit, both for and against action on climate change. The well-trodden narrative that creating regulations and policies to protect the environment can only harm job growth is a product of that.
“We’re heading in the right direction technologically, economically [and] in terms of young people caring more. But none of it together is enough to avoid the serious and potentially dangerous impacts of climate change and that’s the problem we have in a nutshell,” Hayhoe said.
The Obama Administration made some steps towards combating climate change, culminating in his signing of the Paris Agreement, the biggest ever global agreement to fight climate change (though it was non-binding). The Trump administration’s singular withdrawal from the international pact to keep Earth from warming more than two degrees Celsius got the most media attention, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. Former fossil fuel industry executives are now in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency and are delaying, or actually scrapping, the implementation of climate policies.
The Trump administration may be arguably the most hostile administration yet to the consensus widely held by scientists that climate change is man-made, but it is also hardly surprising. For decades America’s two- party system has divided those who believe in the existence of climate change and those who don’t. Democrats have spent generations calling for action on climate change, and Republicans have been just as busy being skeptical at best. That has been GOP doctrine for decades, and between President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel – a Kentucky Republican who has been talking about the “war on coal” since long before Trump became a politician – it’s not likely to change officially.
And he isn’t the only one. NBC News reported in March that while Republicans like John Shimkus (R – Illinois) dismiss the Green New Deal as naive and ruinously expensive, they do believe that climate change is a man-made danger and opt to combat it with free market solutions like tax incentives and cutting certain regulations, rather than piling on taxes and regulations.
And while their views may have been unusual on the right until fairly recently, they aren’t coming out of nowhere. ConservAmerica is a non-profit that recognizes the threat of climate change and wants to solve it, but in a more conservative, free market way. Describing his organization as a “traditional Teddy Roosevelt conservationist” group, the groups’ president Rob Sissons said “the horse is out of the barn” when it comes to the transition.
Rather than dictating greenhouse reduction goals, or acting as an employer of last resort, ConservAmerica wants to approach climate change by championing the emerging use of natural gas, because it is so much cleaner than oil or coal. And while nuclear energy does produce dangerous waste, Sossions says that it is still better and the waste could be reduced by reprocessing it the way the French do.
“I think policy and [the] market are partners. Finding the balance that enables markets to thrive, create wealth and good paying jobs is the trick that we’re talking about right now,” Sissons said. He added that state policy matters more than federal policy does.
Sissons argues that individual utility providers plan decades out, so an individual four or eight year term can’t do much to change their long term plans. Whether states embrace a green economy matters more in the long run, because it makes some states more attractive than others to set up in.
“Every state has a public utility commission that sets the rules for that state. I think that’s one thing a lot of NGOs over the last four/five years, is working with state policy makers because that’s where the rubber meets the road and that’s where utilities have to satisfy state regulators,” Sissons added.
The fastest growth in solar jobs in 2017 were in Tennessee, Utah, Montana, Maine, Iowa, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Minnesota, all of whom saw more than 20 percent job growth, according to the Solar Foundation. The states that saw the brunt of the job decrease includes some surprises – like California, New Mexico, Texas and Hawaii.
“We need guardrails to ensure markets don’t bury communities with pollution or unsafe working conditions,” Sissons said.
It’s hard to predict beyond generalizations what jobs will exist 20 years from now. The pace of innovation has been accelerating exponentially since the Industrial Age kicked off and for generations, America has been a natural center of innovation.
“This is not a problem the United States can solve itself. But we can lead the world in technological innovation,” David Foster of Energy Futures Imitative said.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Materials Research Laboratory found last November that the cost of photovoltaic solar panels has gone down by 99 percent in the last 40 years, due in large part to government policies that stimulated the growth of the industry, accounting for 60 percent of the cost reduction, according to MIT. Other factors included an industry that was learning by doing, improved manufacturing techniques, constantly innovating and taking advantage of the increasingly favorable economies of scale.
In fact there are two big factors in determining what parts of the country have grown in alternative fuels and green jobs and which haven’t – geography and policy.
“The growth of solar in the Southwestern part of the country creates a very different value change than coal that was mined primarily in Appalachia,” Foster said.
Keefe says clean energy jobs don’t have to be focused in the parts of the country they are, though. You might expect that California is the largest state for solar energy in the country, but North Carolina is the second.
“Policy makers in North Carolina saw the potential for solar in that state,” Keefe said. “The sun doesn’t shine any brighter in North Carolina than it does in Georgia or Virginia, or a lot of other places in this country. But it’s been created there because of the policy and the foresight. And by the way, they’ve created ten thousand plus jobs in that state along the way.”
Last October, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper signed Executive Order No. 80, which set the state on the path by 2025 to reduce its carbon emissions by 40 percent less than they were in 2005. They plan to do this by increasing the number of zero-emission vehicles on the roads and establishing a North Carolina Clean Energy Plan, “to encourage the use of clean energy, including wind, solar, energy efficiency and energy storage,” according to the state. Cooper cited the battering the Carolina’s took by Hurricane’s Matthew and Florence to justify his executive order, according to the Hill.
“California has the most progressive policies of any state in the nation. Critics would call those regulations. But it’s also benefited tremendously from the growth of clean energy, both in terms of jobs and economic investment, economic growth and in environmental gains,” Keefe said.
California’s state government wants to reduce “greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030,” according to its climate change website. They’re doing this by increasing fuel efficient and clean energy cars, and installing more efficient utilities, smart grid technology and renewable energy like solar.
They’re even using industry specific methods like “at berth” power techniques, according to the California Air Resources Board, for example. Massive cargo ships crisscross the ocean full of the products we use and when they get to a port, they tend to sit idle, waiting for their turn to use the docks. This 2007 policy has the ships turn off most or all of their power generation systems – often diesel engines – and connect to the mains power on shore, reducing climate emissions significantly.
What is becoming a huge problem is finding qualified people, according to the Energy and Employment Report. The 2019 USEER found that an alarmingly 76.9 percent of employers surveyed reported having difficulty finding workers. Power companies across all sectors – construction, manufacturing, transport – all hovered around the 50 percent work, saying that candidates simply lacked the education or experience to be hired.
Adrienne Pierre of the solar cell installation company Iron Ridge says that preparing American workers for green alternatives to traditional work is something that the government has not done well.
“Whether you’re talking about taxi drivers being displaced by ride hailing apps or coal miners being displaced by renewable energy initiatives, this is something that folks need help with and the communities need support and to be worked with to move them through some of these transitions. We don’t seem to get ahead of it and seemed surprised that these folks are displaced. And the response to addressing that displacement is to proplogate technology from an antiquated perspective, that we should help them keep their jobs. We should help them transition,” Pierre said.
PART TWO
The newly sworn in group of freshmen Democrats in Congress have made a point in thinking about the future with the Green New Deal that they have introduced with great fanfare - to a predictable amount of dismissive jeering from the Republican side of America, led eagerly by President Trump.
“In the beautiful Midwest, windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded,” Trump tweeted during last winter’s polar vortex. “What the hell is going on with Global Warming? Please come back fast, we need you!”
The Green New Deal calls for the country to get 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources within a decade. It is a very broad outline, calling for the creation of high paying jobs, and special care being taken to ensure that marginalized parts of American society benefit well from the act. It would also use the bipartisan calls for repairing the country’s aging infrastructure with only environmentally friendly methods.
These goals are ambitious and in the long term some of them are even inevitable, but ten years is most likely not a realistic time period. The Department of Energy estimates that wind could provide just over a third of the nation’s electricity by 2050, and it’s conceivable that solar, hydroelectric, biomass and geothermal power could fill in the rest. A carbon neutral economy is attainable within this century, but not within the timeframe the progressive branch of the Democratic party wants.
“l was a big advocate and one of the architects in the first go-round of the Green New Deal, which started back in 2008, at the height of the Great Recession,” Foster said, which was quite a different proposal to a very different economic situation. “The Green New Deal that we were talking about was primarily a drive to try to convince governments around the world – and the US government as well – to try to allocate 25 percent of the stimulus spending that governments were agreeing to engage in” on new green technologies.
This was partially possible because the price of oil skyrocketed at about that time, making it look for a minute like a lurch towards green energy and manufacturing was suddenly very desirable. But ultimately the recession petered out, the price of oil dropped, and the Green New Deal went dormant for about a decade before coming back up now, as a very different proposal.
The big problem with jobs of the future is job loss due to automation. Entire professions have been retired to the history books and niche hobbyists. For example, there used to be a whole class of workers who fixed typewriters for a living, now it’s a hobby for people who like mechanical antiques. All of the clothes people wore were made by hand once upon a time; now most of it is machine made and hand made suits are a very expensive luxury.
It might seem reassuring to some when the Washington Post reported recently that a robot designed to replace pickers in strawberry fields in Florida – Harv, designed by Tampa-based Harvest Croo Robotics – only successfully picks a fifth of the plants it attempts to harvest. But robotics and other tech innovation is advancing all the time, and this machine’s slow and steady progress could overtake the cost efficiency of employing humans sooner rather than later.
This might not seem that frightening when you consider how low skilled and low paid this type of work is. But it is the lifeline of employment for thousands of workers. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that farm hands earned around $23,000 per year as of May 2017 and that there will be little change in job demand between now and 2026.
Automation is already predicted on the BLS website: “Despite increased demand for crops and other agricultural products, employment growth is expected to be tempered as agricultural establishments continue to use technologies that increase output per farmworker.”
Automation in manufacturing is likely to keep right going on, especially as increasingly sophisticated computerized design continues to advance. And 3D printing, though still in its infancy, has the potential to minimize the number of Humans involved even more.
The Green New Deal also calls for the construction of a network of bullet trains. Progressives want this network to be built in order to both bring down the frequency of commercial flights – and therefore the air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions – and to create jobs along the way.
A similar project is already underway in California, but it is way over budget – now around $77 billion, from an initial $45 billion – and years behind schedule. Californian Governor Gavin Newsom has had to cancel parts of the ambitious program he inherited. A network that was supposed to connect San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco Bay and the Central Valley together. But it’s been reduced to the Central Valley portion in order to remain viable.
When President Trump claimed on Twitter recently that it was cancelled, the governor responded, “Fake News.” Then he added “We’re building high-speed rail, connecting the Central Valley and beyond.”
He blamed “too little oversight and not enough transparency” for the problems in his first State of the State address. He then pledged to complete the Merced to Bakersfield portion.
Trains going hundreds of miles per hour on specialized, separated tracks, between large urban areas is an integral part of most other economies in the developed world. Japan started building them in the 1960s and France opened its state-owned system in 1981. But the United States has not built one, partially because of the dominance of airlines and partially because of American population centers being much further apart than in Japan or wealthy European countries.
Amtrak’s attempt – the Acela Express between Washington D.C. and Boston – only goes at its 150 mile per hour top speed for brief intervals; compared to Chinese and Japanese bullet trains which can go well past 200 MPH.
America’s infrastructure was once the envy of the world and it is still impressive. But the country is massive and so is its infrastructure. The monumental task of maintaining it has been largely kicked down the road for so long that we now have a still-functioning, but mostly crumbling, system of pipes, bridges and power lines.
The Fourth National Climate Assessment said “Our nation’s aging and deteriorating infrastructure is further stressed by increases in heavy precipitation events, coastal flooding, heat, wildfires” and that “without adaptation, climate change will continue to degrade infrastructure performance over the rest of the century.”
All of this green reconstruction is technically achievable in the long term. The Green New Deal, as proposed by the progressive left of the Democratic Party, is a very earnest attempt to solve the nation’s problems. However, there is a key part of the original New Deal that is missing from this attempt to make it work: An economic crisis.
A virtual God among American liberals, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to deal with an economy in nose-dive mode by an American public that perceived that they had had a president – his predecessor, Herbert Hoover – who was asleep at the wheel of a car that just kept crashing. Roosevelt may have been building on the legacy of the Progressive politics of the late Gilded Age, but his logical next step in the original form of American progressivism – which is notably different than contemporary progressivism – was very much a shot in the dark for a lot of Americans.
It’s easy to forget just how radical the New Deal was at the time. This was a big government solution to a country that had never known anything other than a small, libertarian-flavored form of democracy. But desperation came strong enough that the public was willing to try anything that could possibly work.
The United States isn’t anywhere near as desperate as we were in the early 1930s. Yes, the United States economy is showing signs of cooling down. And yes, American wealth inequality is at an almost cartoonish extreme. But even if you accept and account for the fact that the recovery from the 2008 housing bubble that caused the great recession – a depression in and of itself, whatever we call it – benefitted mostly the wealthy, the fact is that the United States is still the world’s most lucrative market and it has been growing steadily since the worst of the recession was over. Sure, it has been uneven – very. But we are not in a crisis mode. While nobody wishes ill of the economy we all live on, it might just be that for the Green New Deal to work, an economic catastrophe would have to happen first.
Barring that, you can make the argument that the climate change that nearly 100 percent of all credible scientists have been saying is real for the entire life of the millennial generation is the equivalent of the economic dire straits that the United States, and the world, was in in the early 1930s.
But in order for that argument to translate into policy, you won’t have to convince the 14 percent of people who don’t believe in climate change, or convince the 73 percent of American adults that a recent Yale study found believe in climate change. You’ll have to convince the Americans who think of it as a low priority, or think that there is nothing that can be done about it.
This argument may be futile. But just because the Green New Deal likely has too ambitious of a time scale doesn’t mean it should be dismissed. Just because it is not a front page priority for everyone now, doesn’t mean it won’t be in the future. And Sissons added, just because a plan to tackle it isn’t perfectly environmental, doesn’t mean that the slight improvements that could get us to a green economy aren’t worth doing.
“People tend to broadly supportive of [helping the environment] but the depth of that support tends to be very shallow,” Foster said. He added that given the choice between people’s environmental interests and their economic interests, they will be more concerned with taking care of the latter. “The problem with treating climate change like it’s exclusively an environmental issue is that you’ve thrown yourself into exactly that problem. When you define climate change as an environmental issue, you’re almost automatically taking it off the front burner.” To make it work, Foster argues that you’ve got to make the transition to a “low carbon economy” economically desirable in order for people to go for it.
The Green New Deal is the plan for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to do both at once, emphasizing the use of the government to create a better and more equitable economy while on the way to saving the environment. Groups like ConservAmerica care about the environment too, but they’re going at it from the opposite direction – emphasizing tax breaks and free market forces to save the environment as a way to secure the economy for the future.
The culture of climate change denial is still very strong on the American political right. But there is an alternative there too and it’s wrong to presume both that you have to choose between the two, and that one side is exclusively in favor of helping the environment and the other is only concerned about the economy.
A Green New Deal may be welcome under certain circumstances, but the necessary economic conditions aren’t going to come easily. And the ability for green technology to compete with centuries-old, vested, fossil-fuel interests is still evolving. But the nature of the age we’re living in is that innovation is going to exponentially accelerate no matter what happens. So given a decade, a green economy could become realistic enough that this needed transition can happen.
That’s why making the transition and the national conversation about what is better for the economy may be the best way to go. The genie is out of the bottle for both climate change and the green energy response to it. But to ensure the genie works fast enough, it may be more realistic to convince the American people that the green economy is better for their wallets. The people who can be convinced that it’s better for their water, air and food have already been convinced.