A new study released by Palgrave Communications Tuesday estimates that the U.S. “green economy” employs 9.5 million people and cranks out $1.3 trillion in annual sales revenue. That’s 4% of the nation’s workforce and 7% of the gross domestic product. It’s also 16.5% of the global green economy. U.S. green sales rose 20% between 2013 and 2016, and they are expected to rise further as more efforts are made to reduce the impacts of the climate crisis.
During that same four-year period, the coal industry saw the loss of another 37,000 jobs. The study found especially big increases in renewable energy, with consultancy and wind energy rising 9.36% and 8.56% respectively in 2015-2016. That strong showing was more than three times the GDP growth rate for the same period.
Competition is rising. China plans to create 13 million clean energy jobs by the end of next year.
The study’s authors, Lucien Georgeson and Mark Maslin, wrote:
The economic case for driving economic growth and job creation through fossil fuels has weakened based on the employment estimates in fossil fuels, and there are genuine risks of stranded assets. To safeguard US economic development and job creation, we suggest that economic, environmental and education policies need to be developed to support the US green economy in the context of global developments in the green economy.
They didn’t attempt to calculate the effects on the U.S. green economy that might be produced by having fossil fuel fool Donald Trump in the White House for another four years.
E&E News reporter Haley Weiss writes:
Measuring the United States' green economy is notoriously difficult: Congress has voted against streamlining and unifying data collection from the relevant industries since 2013, the last time the Bureau of Labor Statistics had meaningful green economy data. Government agencies put out their own workforce data, but many attempts to incorporate estimates of privately run workforces based on those numbers haven't relied on much more than speculation.
To build a more reliable green economy data set, Georgeson and Maslin collected information about sales revenue and employment from hundreds of private companies across 24 economic subsectors they determined to be the elements of a low-carbon, efficient and socially inclusive economy.
"The lack of reporting and measurement since the loss of funding to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) Green Goods and Services (GGS) survey suggests that there is an important gap to be filled by alternative measurement approaches," they wrote.
Georgeson, a professor of geography at University College London, said, “Our analysis suggests that the case for driving economic growth and job creation through fossil fuels is weakening, based on the available data. [...] In order to support the development of the green economy, the U.S. needs to focus its attention on designing appropriate economic, environmental and education policies. This should be supported by commissioning and publishing green economy data, which the US Federal government has not done since 2013.”
Expanding the green economy rapidly enough to have a positive effect on the climate crisis will require much stronger governmental effort at the local, state, and federal levels. Advocates, of course, believe that the Green New Deal should be the foundation of that effort. But while the outline in the Ocasio-Cortez/Markey resolution is clear, GND specifics are yet to come. The team at New Consensus expects to have come up with draft GND legislation by next March. Assuming Democrats win the presidency and a Senate majority, some version of the GND is almost certain to be introduced in Congress in early 2021.