Here's a fun headline: "California’s Green Economy Doubled Performance of Total Economy During Downturn." All of the GOP puffing and huffing about how we need more dirty energy infrastructure to create jobs and that switching to sustainable technologies will kills jobs turns out to be false. Well we all knew that intuitively, but here's the proof.
The big story was job creation in the clean energy/materials manufacturing sector, which increased by 53% from 1995 to 2010 while jobs in the rest of the manufacturing sector dropped by 18%.
The Brookings Institue had
a similar report for the whole country last year.
Growth in jobs, wages, and GDP has been too slow, for sure, but the clean economy has been one of the few brights spots. From 2008 to 2009, the clean economy grew by 8.3% — almost double what the overall economy grew during those years.
So why is no one talking about it? Climate Change is the greatest challenge we face. Changes are happening much much faster than models predicted just a couple years ago. I used to worry about what the planet would look like for my grandkids. Today I worry about what it will look like when my children are in college in ten years. It's not choice of either jobs OR addressing climate change.