Green industry jobs capture White House race

Green-collar jobs are the zeitgeist in the race for the White House. Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards are promising to outdo each other with the numbers of jobs they will create in the renewable energy and conservation industries, and with their assurances that these jobs will not be offshored.

There are many potential voters working in old economy industries in the US -- coal, steel, car manufacturing, Great Plains agribusiness -- who will fear they may be voting their jobs away if they go for a Democrat in November, and that it would be better to bury their heads in the sand.

But hark! A UN report presented at Bali in December last year argued that the move to a green economy will create more work than it destroys. The principle concept is that the labour intensity of creating renewable energy is higher than the fossil fuels and nuclear power that they replace. That means there will be jobs aplenty in construction, sustainable forestry and agriculture, engineering and transportation -- even if they are more back-breaking than the old jobs they're replacing.

The UN study estimated that the environmental industry in the US generated 5.3 million jobs in 2005, ten times more than pharmaceuticals. Recently, the American Solar Energy Society weighed in with its own US estimates of 8.5 million green jobs in 2007, reaching 40 million by 2030.

Back in the UK, Gordon Brown recently said the UK's environmental industries were already worth more than £25bn and employed 400,000 people, and that a further one million jobs will be created over the next two decades.

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