Of all the green trends catching buzz in the business world today, "green-collar jobs" and a "green workforce" are among the most exciting. The premise is pretty simple. As marketplace demand for clean energy continues to grow rapidly - spurred by climate change concerns, skyrocketing oil prices, resource constraints, and other factors - the clean-tech sector will be one of the fastest-expanding sectors of the U.S. economy. Therefore, it holds the promise of healthy job creation at a time when overall job growth is relatively moribund.
Even better, the clean-tech sector is seeing a groundswell of support for job creation in distressed, low-income urban neighborhoods - traditionally the site of a city's most harmful environmental health impacts, like toxic waste sites and coal-fired power plants. Community leaders are increasingly seeking not just environmental cleanups, but green-minded economic development. There are great examples of this principle in action across the country, from Hunts Point in the Bronx, where Sustainable South Bronx teaches local youth the skills of environmental remediation, to Hunters Point in San Francisco, where a non-profit called GRID Alternatives trains local residents to do residential solar power installations in their neighborhoods. Efforts like these address a range of issues all at once: unemployment, economic dislocation, at-risk youth, public health, carbon reduction, air and water pollution...it's a real win-win for everyone.
Last week, the California Public Utilities Commission and several other groups convened an excellent one-day conference on these issues called Advancing the New Energy Economy in California. Leaders ranging from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to PG&E CEO Peter Darbee extolled the benefits of clean-tech job creation to an audience of more than 800. "We need to connect the people who most need work with the work that most needs to be done," said Van Jones, director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, Calif., and a fellow Huffington Post blogger, who has deservedly emerged as one of the nation's most charismatic and compelling leaders of the green jobs movement.
But the elephant in the room that day was the previous week's dire state budget address by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who did not attend the conference but appeared in a feel-good video about clean tech's economic promise for the state. In order to close a projected $14.5 billion budget deficit, "The Governator" proposed deep spending cuts across virtually all areas, including community colleges, overall education, and job training - precisely the building blocks needed for a new energy economy. And California is hardly the only state in a current financial pickle.
I'm an optimist by nature, and it is very heartening to see the commitment of non-profits and the private sector to create clean-energy jobs and train workers to fill them. But government has a role to play too, and like it or not, a big part of that role is adequate funding. Congress took a good step in last year's energy bill with a Green Jobs Act that authorizes $125 million for green-collar job training. It doesn't quite compare to the level of subsidies that go to the fossil fuel industries, but it's a good start from the federal level - enough to train about 30,000 workers a year, according to Jones.
But in California, the nation's clean tech leader in everything from venture capital funding to energy efficiency standards, the statewide funding news is discouraging. Big clean energy visions, inspiring speeches, and slick videos are nice, but they need the meat of solid (and solvent) policies and programs to accomplish their goals. For California or any other state, poor economic conditions today are no excuse for discarding the tools to build the economy of tomorrow.