A new report by Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), flagged this past week by the San Antonio Business Journal, found that over 110,000 new clean energy jobs were announced in 2012. The group tracked over 300 project announcements across multiple sectors and in every region of the country.

A few of the noteworthy 2012 trends in E2′s report include:

• Public transportation drove clean job growth nationwide, clocking in at over 43,000 jobs over the course of the year. Power generation, most of which came from solar, wind, and geothermal, came in second with more than 30,000 jobs.
• Solar power was a strong and steady job creator throughout the year, and especially in the fourth quarter, providing over 19,000 jobs between the manufacturing and power generation sectors.
• Investment in energy efficiency hit a record high of $5.6 billion in 2012, according to E2′s analysis of government data, thanks to the announcement of as many as 9,000 new jobs.
• Uncertainty over the production tax credit hit wind energy, leading to a decline in job creation announcements in the fourth quarter, even as capacity installation ramped up at the end of the year to get in under the anticipated expiration. But now that the “fiscal cliff” deal has extended the credit for another year, 2013 expectations show wind energy regaining some of its momentum.

State-wise, California dominated 2012 with 26,354 jobs announced, and North Carolina came in second with 10,867 jobs. The latter state lead the way at years’s end, however, announcing 7,610 of its total jobs in the fourth quarter — over 6,000 more than any other state. Florida, Illinois, Connecticut, Arizona, New York, Michigan, Texas, and Oregon rounded out the rest of the top ten states for clean energy job creation, in that order.

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One of the only national journalists to write regularly about the story of the century is three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Friedman.

The centrist columnist pulls no punches in his Sunday NY Times column, “No to Keystone. Yes to Crazy,” which opens:

I HOPE the president turns down the Keystone XL oil pipeline. (Who wants the U.S. to facilitate the dirtiest extraction of the dirtiest crude from tar sands in Canada’s far north?) But I don’t think he will. So I hope that Bill McKibben and his 350.org coalition go crazy. I’m talking chain-themselves-to-the-White-House-fence-stop-traffic-at-the-Capitol kind of crazy, because I think if we all make enough noise about this, we might be able to trade a lousy Keystone pipeline for some really good systemic responses to climate change.

He notes we’re at a unique time in our history:

We don’t get such an opportunity often — namely, a second-term Democratic president who is under heavy pressure to approve a pipeline to create some jobs but who also has a green base that he can’t ignore. So cue up the protests, and pay no attention to people counseling rational and mature behavior. We need the president to be able to say to the G.O.P. oil lobby, “I’m going to approve this, but it will kill me with my base. Sasha and Malia won’t even be talking to me, so I’ve got to get something really big in return.”

But while he praises Obama for some key individual climate policies, overall he sees back-sliding:

Face it: The last four years have been a net setback for the green movement. While President Obama deserves real praise for passing a historic increase in vehicle mileage efficiency and limits on the emissions of new coal-fired power plants, the president also chose to remove the term “climate change” from his public discourse and kept his talented team of environmentalists in a witness-protection program, banning them from the climate debate. This silence coincided with record numbers of extreme weather events — droughts and floods — and with a huge structural change in the energy marketplace.

I discussed the origins of this ‘strategy’ here (see “Team Obama Launched The Inane Strategy Of Downplaying Climate Change Back In March 2009“).

What is the structural change in the marketplace that Friedman refers to? Why none other than our new frenemy, hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) — along with “horizontal drilling at much greater distances.”

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Since confusionists keep low-balling the cost of climate inaction, here’s a repost from 2009 about a study that received too little attention at the time.

Scientists led by a former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [warn] that the UN negotiations aimed at tackling climate change are based on substantial underestimates of what it will cost to adapt to its impacts.

The real costs of adaptation are likely to be 2-3 times greater than estimates made by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), say Professor Martin Parry and colleagues in a new report published by the International Institute for Environment and Development [IIED].

And as the IIED reported, the study Assessing the costs of adaptation to climate change: a review of the UNFCCC and other recent estimates concludes costs will be even more when the full range of climate impacts on human activities is considered.

The study finds that the mean “Net present value of climate change impacts” in the A2 scenario is $1240 TRILLION with no adaptation, but “only” $890 trillion with adaptation.

The mean [annual] impacts in 2060 are about $1.5 trillion….  As usual, there is a long right tail, with a small probability of impacts as large as $20 trillion.

Don’t worry folks, it’s only a “small probability” — but that “fat tail” by itself is enough to render all traditional economic analyses useless (see Harvard economist: Climate cost-benefit analyses are “unusually misleading,” warns colleagues “we may be deluding ourselves and others”).  Let’s put aside the fact we are on pace to exceed the A2 scenario (which is “only” about 850 ppm atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in 2100).  For this country, the A2 scenario means 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year.

But here’s the key point the media and the authors failed to convey.  In the “aggressive abatement” case (450 ppm), the mean “Net present value [NPV] of climate change impacts” is only $410 trillion — or $275 trillion with adaptation.  So stabilizing at 450 ppm reduces NPV impacts by $615 to $830 trillion.  But the abatement NPV cost is only $110 trillion — a 6-to-1 savings or better.

Bizarrely, the authors never point this out directly.  They are adaptation experts, so rather than focusing on the immense economic benefits of preventing catastrophic global warming in the first place, they offer up this secondary conclusion as their primary finding:

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By Adam James, via the Center for American Progress

America in the 21st century will look radically different than it did in the 20th century. There are two interesting trends worth noting that will account for at least part of this difference. First, women are now a majority in the workforce, although progress is uneven, with fewer women in leadership positions. Second, the clean energy economy has begun to take off, currently accounting for 2.7 million U.S. jobs — or 2 percent of all employment — and growing.

At the intersection of these two trends is a real urgency to ensure that gender equity is at the forefront as our nation transforms to become more low-carbon, resilient, and sustainable. Placing gender equity as a priority in the clean economy could help rapidly transition our overall workforce, as the clean economy continues to grow at a rapid pace, taking up a larger and larger portion of total jobs within a variety of sectors.

Embedding gender equity into the booming clean energy market does not necessarily require new policy solutions. The fact is that we already know how to create strong, progressive workforce standards and how to put safeguards in place that prevent discrimination in all its forms. But as we think about the gender gap that exists more generally throughout the economy, it is incredibly important that we continue to consider its impact on the sectors within the clean economy.

This way of thinking has two components. First, we need to make sure that the clean economy does not replicate or reinforce gender inequality. Second, the transition to a clean economy will be faster, stronger, and more sustainable if women are participating equally. As these sectors continue their rapid growth, the incorporation of best practices and standards will ensure that the future is much more equitable, sustainable, and vibrant than the economy of yesterday. The clean economy should be considered an opportunity to model the principles of gender parity that we seek to demonstrate in economic development more broadly.

Below, we examine the gender gap in employment before looking at the sectors that are most commonly employing clean economy workers to give some sense of why it is important to apply best practices and undo some of the damage inflicted by the chronic under-representation of women.

Looking At The Gender Gap And Implications For The Clean Economy

Hard data on the participation rate of women in the clean energy economy is hard to come by. The best studies on calculating jobs in the clean energy economy — or “green goods and services” — do not disaggregate male and female employment. But as the global Clean Energy Ministerial noted when launching its initiative to involve women more in clean energy:

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