Green Jobs: Environmental Fantasy or Tomorrow's Common Reality? Part 4

Why the powerful forces of global competition, domestic manufacturing and retiring baby boomers might provide significant thrust towards the development of an American green-collar workforce

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. Read Part 1 here.

To put it nicely: America is currently getting its butt kicked.

While it seems like a lot of money is being directed at green technologies in North America, the ugly truth is that the biggest investments in clean energy—by far—are happening overseas. Foreign countries are putting America to shame. China has become the clear leader in renewable energy investments. Yes—China. It’s a rapidly industrializing nation with such an insatiable appetite for energy that it now holds the odd distinction of being the leader in both dirty and clean power generation.

A report titled Clean Tech Job Trends 2010 from Clean Edge, Inc., a research and advisory firm dedicated to the clean technology sector, states:

It may seem contradictory that the world’s largest consumer of iron, steel, cement, oil, coal, and meat—and now the world’s largest emitter of global greenhouse emissions—is also a clean-tech champion, but that’s exactly what’s playing out.

“China now leads in solar PV manufacturing,” says Ron Pernick, co-founder and managing director of Clean Edge. “Last year (2009), it beat out the United States to be the largest installer of wind in the world. It has the largest solar hot water industry on the planet.”

This might turn out to be a good thing. Americans love rooting for the underdog—a position in which they now find themselves. Once this is fully realized, it could mean a renewed sense of national purpose and a reawakening of the underlying cooperative spirit that enabled the United States to become a superpower in the first place.

“Competition is good,” says Pernick. “Imagine if people worked in a vacuum or isolation. Or, if it’s just about climate, then you don’t see shifts. But you’ve got China aggressively pursuing clean tech. You’ve got Samsung looking to invest, potentially, $10 billion into a build-out of changing itself into a clean-tech company. GE has its Ecomagination program and other commitments it is making. These are wake-up calls.”

Clean technology is a key piece of the future global marketplace and prosperous economies. If America wants to be part of that future, it has a whole lot of ground to gain—and quickly. Clean Tech Job Trends 2010 states:

Barring any significant policy changes by other nations, China-based companies are poised to increasingly dominate as clean-tech employers both domestically and abroad—unsettling news for other nations looking for their companies to gain a competitive clean-tech advantage.

According to this same report, eight of the top 10 employers in the sector—publicly traded companies dedicated solely to clean technology—are foreign companies. That means, right now, most green jobs are being created overseas.

China has been particularly aggressive at luring big companies—even American ones—to establish large research and development operations within its borders. And it has pursued very protectionist trading policies, making it more difficult for other nations to compete in the clean technology sector.

What’s emerging is a new race. But, instead of an arms race or a space race like what happened during the Cold War, this one will be for clean energy superiority. Some are calling it the “Green War.” In 2009, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, China attracted 98 percent more private investment for renewable energy than the United States. As well, Europe, Japan and South Korea all have made strong commitments to the green energy sector, resulting in established companies that conduct business in the U.S. and around the world. Even nations like Brazil, Portugal and India have joined the clean technology race.

Will America be able to keep pace with such dedicated competition so that it, too, can create the good-paying green jobs touted as the future?

I personally believe that Americans will want to bounce back and hold their own in the global marketplace for clean energy. With inspiring leadership, that’s definitely what we can do—must do—to avoid getting left too far behind. The only question is whether it will happen quickly enough.

“On the one hand, we do need to develop the technologies here within the U.S. borders so that we can benefit from participating in the renewable energy industries,” says Jeannette Wicks-Lim, an economist at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “On the other hand, there are a lot of things that we can do right now that would not be susceptible to strong competition from abroad: constructing and maintaining a better, more accessible public transit system and retrofitting private and public buildings and homes. These types of economic activities produce many more jobs per dollar of investment than compared even to investing in renewable power or the fossil fuels industry.”

So focusing on retrofitting America’s buildings to be much more energy efficient is one way to produce some green jobs at home. But that won’t be enough to maintain the nation’s competitiveness. America, in spite of its political divisions, will be forced to take further creative action.

“Competition from China…is a real worry,” says Wicks-Lim. “We can’t compete on the basis of costs alone—labor costs in particular—nor do I think that we want to unless we want to accept a fall in living standards here in the U.S. Rather, we need to develop some degree of technological advantage or a large efficiency advantage by producing domestically in the U.S. to compete.”

Fear of climate change impacts may not currently be producing enough action toward renewable energy development in America, but fear of losing its relatively high living standards and global leadership position may, at some point, finally get things moving more assertively. It will no longer be a matter of rigid idealism, but one of practicality.

And it’s practicality that’s at the heart of what is shaping another aspect of the green-jobs question: domestic manufacturing.