The 2010 Hunger Report

Roofers install solar panels on a home in the District of Columbia.

If it were ever really true that what’s good for the environment is bad for business and vice versa, the tradeoff has swiftly become an anachronism, largely because of the pressing need to address climate change. Climate change will be a huge challenge—and a tremendous economic opportunity. It’s possible to battle climate change and create jobs at the same time.

Greening the economy means different things to different people, but in this report we’re referring to a transformation of the nation’s energy infrastructure, from carbon-intensive fossil fuels to clean, renewable forms of energy such as solar, wind, and geothermal. We also include stepping up investments in cost-effective energy efficiency, such as weatherizing homes and office buildings.

“Green jobs” may sound like something altogether new, but they are mostly jobs that already exist with new skills added to the mix. A green roofer is like any other roofer, except that he has been trained to build roofs that are energy efficient. A manufacturer of solar cells is a green manufacturer in the sense that she is producing parts for the clean energy industry, but she is still a manufacturer.

Improvements in the nation’s infrastructure can yield significant productivity gains throughout the economy. Energy savings is just one reason that this is a wise investment. Because infrastructure projects are labor-intensive, they produce many more jobs than investments in most other sectors of the economy.¹ Proponents of a greener economy believe that clean energy and energy efficiency can engage a sizeable share of the U.S. workforce for at least a generation.² For each job that is created in the clean energy sector, there are additional jobs created by indirect and induced effects. “Indirect” effects come from industries that supply intermediate goods to clean energy producers. “Induced” effects refer to the sectors that produce goods and services that workers in the new clean energy sector buy with their own incomes. The total number of jobs created depends on the scale of public and private investment.

According to the 2009 report The Economic Benefits of Investing in Clean Energy, a joint effort by the Center for American Progress and the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, “Clean-energy investments offer a more favorable result for working people in the United States according to any criteria.” Compared to equivalent investments in fossil fuel industries, for example, clean energy produces many more jobs, including “twice as many high-paying jobs and nearly four times more low-credentialed and low-paying jobs.”

The American Relief and Recovery Act of 2009 included $90 billion in investments to create jobs in clean energy, energy efficiency, and mass transit—investments designed to spur development of a greener economy.³ The American Climate and Energy Security Bill of 2009, sponsored by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA), passed the House of Representatives. It included an additional $60 billion for green job creation. It is estimated that the $150 billion from these two pieces of legislation could generate a net increase of 1.7 million jobs⁴—which would be an impressive down payment on putting the U.S. economy on a path of sustainable growth.

The United States has always been a technological leader, and this is a moment when a technology revolution is underway in clean energy. Policymakers should not look narrowly at the immediate economic potential of this industry while other countries go forward and innovate. Other countries—such as China, India, Japan, Germany, France, and England—are investing in clean energy technologies that could soon pay handsome returns in the marketplace. “We can let the jobs of tomorrow be created abroad,” as President Obama says, “or we can create those jobs right here in America and lay the foundation for future prosperity.”⁵

When the wind farms on the Rosebud Reservation are running, they will transmit electricity across South Dakota and into neighboring states. The nation’s energy grid, the network of transmission lines that delivers electricity to homes and commercial buildings, must be modernized on a national scale if wind farms and other clean energy sources are to reach the country’s larger population centers. But that is a multi-billion dollar undertaking which appears unlikely to happen without private capital and, even more importantly, federal leadership.

History tells us that federal leadership has previously catalyzed transformative expansions of the nation’s infrastructure. Examples include the interstate highway system, the transcontinental railroad, rural electrification, and the Internet. Meeting the climate challenge, boosting U.S. competitiveness in the global economy, and reducing poverty—all of these are now bundled together and make a powerful case for a new national commitment to transform the U.S. energy infrastructure.

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