The Power of Green

Obama and McCain talked about it for months, as did Hillary.

T. Boone Pickens never stops talking about it, in TV commercials and web sites.

Everyone’s talking about green collar jobs, one of the very few glimmers on an increasingly gloomy economic scene. And after a week when the Dow sheds points like the maple outside my window drops leaves, we need good news.

In fact, when pressed in the last two debates about what he’d cut from his ambitious platform of middle class tax cuts, health care reform, and more, now president-elect Obama went out of his way to say he would make sure he did NOT cut spending on new energy sources like wind and solar, because that’s where the jobs are.

And the UN agrees. A report earlier this fall revealed that there are millions of jobs to be had in the emerging green economy. Among the report’s findings:

The global market for environmental products and services is projected to double from $1.37 trillion per year at present to $2.74 trillion by 2020.

Half of this market is in energy efficiency and the balance in sustainable transport, water supply, sanitation and waste management.

Clean technologies are already the third largest sector for venture capital after information and biotechnology in the United States, while green venture capital in China more than doubled to 19% of total investment in recent years.

2.3 million people have in recent years found new jobs in the renewable energy sector alone, and the potential for job growth in the sector is huge. Employment in alternative energies may rise to 2.1 million in wind and 6.3 million in solar power by 2030.

And this is key: Renewable energy generates more jobs than employment in fossil fuels.

Projected investments of $630 billion by 2030 would translate into at least 20 million additional jobs in the renewable energy sector.

That’s the ticket, putting people back to work installing solar panels, building wind turbines, planting green roofs, insulating and re-wiring houses, and more.

The power of green: the greening of the economy will be led by a, well, greening of the economy.

Out of the Frying Pan...

A soaring wall of thunderheads just passed overhead, rumbling and flashing but not raining one-tenth as much as I expected.

Nonetheless, it broke the back of that psyche-shattering heat wave we’ve been mired in. Check this out: my kids have been given half-days off to avoid the heat. Early June and it feels like the dog days of August.

So the last two days here, parents have been lining up at school carpool queues to pick up their little charges, not wanting them to swelter on the long bus trip. And the cars—all those Suburbans and Tahoes—sit there, engines idling, air conditioners on full, waiting to whisk kids home to central air turned all the way up.

It’s ironic: as the heat climbs, power usage escalates—or in your Cadillac, it Escalades. As usage climbs, we burn more fossil fuels cooling down, and greenhouse gas emissions rise, forming a positive feedback loop. The hotter it gets, the more power we consume; the more power we consume, the hotter it gets. And carbon dioxide concentrations keep ratcheting up.

Two weeks from now, I expect we’ll hear this is one of the hottest Junes ever. Meanwhile, just last week, Congress punted on a climate change bill that, imperfectly unexplainable as it might have been, would at least have been a statement. Those who filibustered claim combating climate change is too “costly.”

Maybe, but tell that to a farmer with scorched corn.

Thankfully, both McCain and Obama take climate change seriously, so we’ll see what happens next year. (Meanwhile, Chevy is abandoning Tahoes and Suburbans for the emission-free electric Volt. Now there’s progress.)

But at some point, like with the war effort, we’re going to begin to need to make some personal sacrifices to cool the climate. We continue wanting to have our cake and eat it too, but the oven doesn’t work anymore.

Still, the heat wave broke. Tomorrow’s high will only be 89. Whew.