Green Jobs: Environmental Fantasy or Tomorrow's Common Reality? Part 1

How the focus on climate change might be blinding us from the real potential for green jobs in America—and why you might want to consider training for a green-collar career (even if you don’t believe in man-made global warming)

Author’s Note: In this five-part series, I explore the forces that will determine whether or not the promise of millions of green jobs in America can ever be fulfilled. Will careers in energy efficiency, environmental technology and clean, renewable energy—such as wind and solar power—become mainstream in the United States? As with so many issues, the answer can probably be found somewhere between the extremes.

I felt duped. The turn of the millennium was like being invited to a wild party with rabies-infected cavemen and techno-munching dinosaurs—only to find out that a menacing-but-toothless iguana that you once believed was a T-Rex has stood you up.

The Y2K computer bug that was supposed to send the developed world back to the Stone Age failed to live up to all the hype, including my own pushy paranoia. (My last evening of the 20th century wasn’t a total loss, however: I partied with Prince like it was 1999—via his New Year’s Eve pay-per-view special.) So, instead of hair-raising doom and gloom, all I got was lonely nostalgia for the glammed-up Purple Rain posters of my fourth grade bedroom from 1984.

Y2K was just one potential disaster in a long, historical string of end-of-civilization possibilities that were either averted through cooperation, ingenuity and hard work or else never had much real bite to begin with. So with global warming now widely promoted as the reigning champ among heavyweight threats to humanity, I can understand why some people might roll their eyes and think, “Here we go again—more sky-is-falling mumbo jumbo. Is the game on yet?”

I would be lying if I said I haven’t formerly held my own doubts about the whole climate change issue. The oil and coal industries have done a terrific job of mucking up intelligent conversation about the matter by playing loose with scientific facts. It can sometimes be difficult to know whose information to trust. And, although I do drive a hybrid like the hippy-dippy idealist I’m sometimes made out to be, I’m still just as addicted to fossil fuels as everyone else in North America.

I bring all this up because it seems that any discussion of renewable energy and green jobs tends to involve a lot of fear-based talk about saving ourselves from the catastrophe of human-caused climate change. And that’s a problem.

According to a survey of Americans conducted in October 2009 by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, only 36 percent of respondents said they believed that there is solid evidence for man-made global warming. (That was even before an over-hyped “scandal” in which British climate scientists from the University of East Anglia were accused of fraudulently doctoring their scientific data.) A Gallup poll from March 2010 also showed that close to half of those surveyed felt that the global warming problem is generally exaggerated, part of a rising trend.

It all points to a big case of “green fatigue,” brought about by too much contradictory information, confusing media messages, intensely polarizing politics and a poor economy that’s made consideration for environmental issues an afterthought for many working-class people. There are even bizarre conspiracy theories circulating that tie environmentalism to a sinister plot by the “global socialist elite” to profit from the climate change scare while establishing a tyrannical one-world government.

Fear, cynicism and apathy, it seems, have led plenty of average citizens to disregard the possibilities for a prosperous and sustainable future in which clean technologies, renewable energy and socially and environmentally friendly jobs can be the norm.

In short, skepticism about human-caused global warming is clouding the judgment of too many Americans and slowing meaningful progress towards a better, cleaner economy. This can make it insanely difficult to arrive at any kind of solid understanding about the potential for great numbers of green jobs to manifest in the United States.

In fact, I initially thought it would be easy to write about clean energy jobs. I had the notion that students and career-seekers should see the pursuit of green careers as a no-brainer, as something clearly worth their efforts. After all, there is a loud chorus of positive hype—mostly, but not exclusively, from the political left—surrounding this issue. But trying to craft a trustworthy article on this subject is like trying to build a cathedral on quicksand while avoiding personal casualty amidst a war between pretentious artists wielding rainbows of doomsday pigments and prehistoric stone masons armed with hallucinogenic rock candy and axes sharpened by denial.

The climate change issue needs to be removed from the conversation, at least temporarily, in order to more clearly analyze the prospects for green jobs and renewable energy growth in America. Once you get beyond the behemoth that is global warming, you soon discover many other powerful forces influencing the development of clean technology—and the jobs that will come with it.