Obama’s plan: clean energy will help drive a recovery

Most of these green-collar jobs will require more education than a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree, and will pay family-supporting wages. That’s huge in a nation in which less than 30 per cent of adults earned a college degree. And many of these jobs could be created in Michigan and other industrial states hardest hit by recent losses of manufacturing jobs.

The transition to a renewable energy economy is already proving to be a powerful economic engine. Before the current recession, clean energy was the fastest-growing industrial sector in the United States. Sales of new materials and equipment for the renewable energy sector - steel, gears, wind turbines, solar panels, insulation, software, high tech batteries, gauges, and hundreds of other products - reached US$25 billion in the US this year, up from less than US$10 billion in 2004.

In 2008, according to the American Wind Energy Association, the United States added 7,500 megawatts of generating capacity from wind - equivalent to eight large coal-fired power plants. Since mid-2007, 41 new wind turbine and component plants opened or expanded, generating 9,000 new jobs. Texas alone this year spent US$3 billion on wind generating equipment. Wind is the leading edge of a clean energy industrial sector that, according to various studies, produced 500,000 new green-collar jobs in the US in the past three years.

Still, executives in the oil, coal, and utility industries, and their allies in Congress, are sceptical that a big change in the status quo is coming. Holding off the new clean energy economy would preserve trillions of dollars of investments in coal, oil, and the equipment that runs on both. Expect a huge fight in Washington, especially over how to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases.

Opponents also believe they have history on their side. After all, they note, the last time an American president got this exercised about clean energy was during the oil crisis of the 1970s, when Jimmy Carter deregulated oil and gas prices, created the Department of Energy, prodded utilities to switch from oil to natural gas and coal, increased fuel mileage standards in cars, and spent lavishly on research and development for solar and other alternative sources of energy.

Then oil and gasoline prices dropped, President Ronald Reagan dismantled Carter’s White House rooftop solar array, and Detroit invented the SUV. By 2008, American oil consumption had soared to 19.5 million barrels a day - 75 per cent of it imported.

Today, however, the urgency underlying the new president’s clean energy plan isn’t oil embargoes or skyrocketing prices. It’s soaring joblessness and a failing economy that runs on carbon-based fuels. As Obama said time and again during the campaign, doing more of the same, repeating what isn’t working, just doesn’t make sense.

A leading advocate of this energy transformation is Alan Durning, the 44-year-old founder and director of the Seattle-based Sightline Institute, an environmental and economic think tank. Back in 1999 - when gasoline briefly sold for under US$1 a gallon, GM pushed 35,000 SUVs out of showrooms every month, and comedians joked that warming temperatures could be cured by switching from Fahrenheit to Celsius - Durning published a prescient 114-page book about resource conservation and job creation entitled Green-Collar Jobs.

In his book, which coined the term that became famous years later, Durning espoused an idea that is now part of the official conversation in Washington.

“A sustainable economy can generate employment just as well as an unsustainable one,” Durning wrote. “For every declining industry, like those that log old-growth forests, make farm chemicals, and build roads, there is an emerging one to take up the slack, like those that advise organic farmers, build windmills, and design walkable neighborhoods. A sustainable economy could be full of opportunity, and not only in these overtly green sectors.”