Green collar jobs are garnering increasing visibility. From the CS Monitor:
On the campaign trail and during Monday's debate, the Democratic presidential candidates touted "green-collar jobs" as a solution to unemployment...
Clean energy has become a $55-billion-a-year industry worldwide, and its rapid growth is fueling a shortage of workers in emerging hubs like California's Bay Area. Advocates for the poor say there's an opportunity here to rebuild an industrial base of well-paying, low-skilled jobs, but some critics question whether they are overstating the job potential of the sector.
"Nearly every city is vying to become a hub of clean technology or green-collar jobs. Every community college that has any budget to develop a new program is looking at a lot of these new technologies," says Joel Makower, executive editor of greenbiz.com in Oakland, Calif.
The Bay Area and Northern California generally are ground zero for this trend. Green building, solar, and even plumbing are redefining what a good blue collar job is. This momentum is reinforced by where investment dollars are going.
California, as usual, scored the largest haul. Venture capitalists poured $1.79 billion into the Golden State's green companies last year, most of them in the Bay Area. That's 45 percent of all green investments in North America, according to data from the Cleantech Group, an organization that tracks and encourages investment in the field.
In 2006, California's green tech companies brought in $1.18 billion, or 41 percent of North America's green investments.
The jobs boom in solar is here and may even exceed San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed's target of 25,000 clean tech jobs...
The hiring binge is likely to continue. Solar Tech, a group of local solar companies trying to create a Solar Center of Excellence in Silicon Valley to serve training and product-testing needs, says the number of people employed locally in solar will grow 10 times over the next 10 years. That's from 1,000 to 2,000 now, to 10,000 to 20,000.
McCalmont, who chairs Solar Tech, said that number might be conservative and could approach 30,000 jobs.
Interestingly, unlike much of the high tech boom, the job base here is much broader from a national perspective. The numbers in the diagram above are national and biomass skews the job counts but green collar jobs as a category spans blue collar and white collar categories and is huge overall as detailed in the American Solar Energy Association's recent report. This is especially true in energy efficiency. As Van Jones likes to note, you can't ship a building offshore to have it weatherized...
There are many issues/problems/challenges that need attention in the world but climate change is different. It's different because it is profoundly intertwined with a huge range of economic, political, technological, socialogical dynamics. Part of the implication is that if we want to succeed we must really think about what it will take to engage all the stakeholders we need to succeed.
Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center is working on one important piece of this puzzle: Green Jobs.
