by Casey J. Bell

The impact of investments in energy efficiency extends well beyond reducing energy costs or addressing the environmental impacts of energy extraction and use. These investments provide jobs for American workers and help them to support their families and communities.

ACEEE has just released a series of six profiles of real world experiences in energy efficiency job creation. These profiles describe programs, policies, investments, partnerships, and business models that have catalyzed regional increases in employment. While previous ACEEE work has provided an analytic framework for how jobs are created through efficiency, this paper focuses on the jobs themselves.

Energy efficiency catalyzes employment opportunities that draw upon the broad range of Americans’ skills. Moreover, as companies’ investments in energy efficiency improve their bottom lines, they experience increased competitiveness, which is a potential contributing factor in bringing jobs back to American soil. Each profile serves as an independent portrait of the various driving forces behind energy efficiency job creation, illustrates the diversity of energy efficiency jobs, and demonstrates the extent to which they draw upon Americans’ existing skills and competencies.

Highlights in the paper distilled from conversations with program representatives and literature review include:

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Industries that support a higher number of “green” workers who are making goods and services more environmentally friendly have experienced a higher rate of growth over the last decade than industries with fewer green jobs.

That’s according to a new study from the Economic Policy Institute, which analyzed data on the green workforce from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS data, which was released in March, documented 3.1 million green jobs nation-wide in renewable energy, water management, recycling, and various positions that help improve the efficiency and environmental footprint of a company or institution.

BLS defined green jobs as:

Jobs in businesses that produce goods or provide services that benefit the environment or conserve natural resources; or, jobs in which workers’ duties involve making their establishment’s production processes more environmentally friendly or ensuring that they use fewer natural resources.

The agency’s figures were given little attention in the mainstream press and were ridiculed by Republicans for including a broad array of positions in transportation, manufacturing, and waste services.

However, Ethan Pollack, a Senior Policy Analyst with the Economic Policy Institute, believed there was more to the data set. So he looked at how environmental and efficiency initiatives were impacting job growth in various sectors.

Pollack found that for every percentage point increase in the “green intensity” of a particular industry, annual job growth in that sector increased by 0.034 of a percentage point between 2000 and 2010.

Pollack also compared the green intensity of industries with BLS employment projections through 2020, finding that industries working to make their processes more efficient and their products more environmentally-friendly will likely see a 0.019 percentage point increase in employment over industries that do not.

“The conversation around green jobs has become polarizing,” said Pollack on a conference call today. “But the concept of green jobs should not be polarizing. We’re trying to depoliticize this issue and show that green jobs are all around us.”

The analysis also found that states with a higher penetration of green jobs saw slightly faster economic recoveries after the recession than states with fewer green jobs. However, this trend is heavily influenced by stimulus funding, which played a major role in continuing investment momentum in the clean energy industries.

This is consistent with last year’s Brookings Institution green jobs study, which found that the “clean economy” grew by 8.3 percent during the height of the U.S. economic downturn between 2008 and 2009 — almost double the overall economy during that period.

Traditionally, green jobs been defined strictly within the clean energy sector. But that industry is only one piece of the overall shift toward a more sustainable economy. In their respective reports, Brookings and BLS report tried to define those jobs as providing a broader array of goods and services that make operations more environmentally-friendly — offering a better representation of how businesses and institutions will make the transition.

This latest report from EPI shows that the deeper the “greening” goes in industries, the more jobs are created.

Related Posts:

• Green Jobs Reach 2.7 Million: The “Clean Economy” Starts Delivering on its Promise of High-Wage Jobs, Brookings finds
• Romney Attacks “Environmentally Friendly” Jobs, Ignoring the 64,000 Green Jobs Created in His State
• Republican Congressman Falsely Claims That ‘Almost All’ Clean Energy Companies Go Bankrupt

Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM)

DENVER, Colorado — Repeating the false claims from Mitt Romney about the track record of clean energy companies, Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM) argued last Thursday that “most of those [wind and solar] companies are now bankrupt.”

In fact, the industry is supporting thousands of innovative small businesses, hundreds of thousands of jobs, and leveraging tens of billions in private capital.

The failure rate of green start-ups was a hot topic in last week’s presidential debate after Mitt Romney falsely claimed that half of green firms that had received funding from the stimulus had failed. His campaign later had to walk back that claim.

Speaking with ThinkProgress the day after the debate, Pearce went a step further. “Almost all of them, the wind and solar stuff,” are now bankrupt, the New Mexico congressman claimed.

PEARCE: I don’t think government should be involved [with PBS]. Otherwise they do like they did on the wind and solar. I think the most powerful turning moment of the debate was when he points out, “you want teachers but you gave $90 billion over to the green energies? What kind of a deal is that?” And most of those companies now are bankrupt. Almost all of them, the wind and solar stuff.

Listen to it:

Pearce’s claim is completely false. According to Mike Grunwald, who has written extensively on the stimulus bill, estimated that less than one percent of green firms had failed. The Environment & Energy Daily writes that “the entire program [loan guarantee program] will have a default rate of just over 3 percent and won’t even come close to using up the roughly $2.4 billion that Congress has set aside to cover losses associated with the program.”

by Jorge Madrid, via EDF’s California Dream 2.0

Economy and jobs are the top issue on Latino voters’ minds, according to the 2012 “Latino Decisions Poll,” a theme that will be featured prominently in this week’s Hispanic Heritage events in DC.

It’s all the more reason to discuss a powerful engine of opportunity in this country called the clean “green” economy – it is here, it is real, and it is one of the few bright spots in an economy desperate for a comeback.

In 2010, I wrote “Green Can Grow Latino Business,” arguing that the clean economy will create new demand for goods and services, new supply chains and niche markets, and opportunities to create new business models and reinvent old ones.

This is a boon for all would-be entrepreneurs, including Latinos — the nation’s fastest growing demographic. Further, new business creates jobs, and jobs create more demand for goods and services, and the virtuous cycle continues.

The results?  Despite the persistence of a national recession, the clean energy sector grew at double the rate of national economy from 2003-2010, attracting record-level investment and venture capital last year, and boasting twice the export value of traditional sectors.  In total, “Green Goods and Services” as defined by the U.S. Department of Labor accounts for 3.1 million U.S. jobs, with more than one-third of those jobs in the struggling construction and manufacturing industries.

In my home state of California, where Latinos make up 38 percent of the state’s population, the numbers are even more striking:

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by Mark Muro, via the Brookings Institution

With Washington mired in unproductive argument this fall, it’s a great time to look elsewhere in America for smart, constructive problem-solving.

Specifically, it’s a great time–in the realm of energy policy–to look at what’s going on in U.S. states, many of which have been at the forefront of implementing innovative clean energy solutions.

Which is why my group at the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings (working with the team at Ken’s Coalition for Green Capital) recently posted a new brief on the growing interest among multiple states in state-level clean energy finance banking—a new innovation in U.S. energy finance and sub-national pragmatism.

Written by Reed Hundt of the coalition, Devashree Saha, and ourselves, the new brief (part of our Brookings-Rockefeller Project on State and Metropolitan Innovation) describes Connecticut’s path-breaking design of the nation’s first “green” bank and proposes ways other states might get into the act.

They probably need to. Financing the broad deployment of clean new energy and energy efficiency solutions remains one today’s most challenging energy policy problems.

Energy efficiency projects remain complicated to finance given their large up-front costs and the limited capital resources available to consumers while the delivered cost of energy from renewable energy projects–even though its has been dropping rapidly–is still generally more expensive than the delivered cost of energy from conventional sources, making the widespread deployment of these projects problematic. Most notably, clean solutions tend to falter in the marketplace because neither their full social benefits not their dirtier competitors’ full social costs are priced in, leaving those dirtier solutions cheaper.

Yet, here is where Connecticut innovated.

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by Andrew, via CleanTechnica

Government investment and support for clean, renewable energy development is paying off handsomely in Massachusetts, where the clean energy economy grew 11.2% between July 2011 and July 2012. The state’s fast-growing clean energy sector now employs 71,523 people at 4,995 clean energy businesses across the state, according to a Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) report released Aug. 16.

Photo: Businesswire

by Silvio Marcacci, via CleanTechnica

On the eve of Mitt Romney’s campaign stop in Ohio, a new report from the Advanced Energy Economy Institute finds that the Buckeye State is home to 25,000 jobs in “22 advanced energy industry segments.”

Though Romney has repeatedly claimed that green jobs are “illusory,” the AEE report finds there are more advanced energy jobs in Ohio than the agriculture and mining industries combined:

“In Ohio, with its productive manufacturing base, robust infrastructure and transportation system, low cost of doing business, and excellent educational system, the advanced energy industry has established a strong foothold and has great capacity to grow.”

The jobs identified in the report are spread among 410 companies that work in “renewable energy, energy efficiency or high-tech manufacturing.” More than 7,000 of the jobs are in building materials, more than 4,000 are in heating, cooling and ventilation, and about 1,400 are in nuclear energy.

According to a recent report the Brookings Institution, green jobs in Ohio pay an average of $3,500 more than typical blue collar jobs. That report, which used a broader definition of the clean economy, also found that Ohio has over 105,000 jobs in the sector.

Ignoring the gains made in the clean economy — a sector that now employs more than 3 million Americans nationwide — Romney recently debuted a television ad attacking the industry. Ironically, there are 64,000 jobs in the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries in Romney’s home state of Massachusetts.

House Speaker John Boehner, who represents the state of Ohio, also seems to be ignoring — if not outright rejecting — the growth in this sector. Under Boehner’s leadership, the Republican-lead House has failed to extend the wind production tax credit (PTC), creating uncertainty in the wind market and leading to the abandonment of a $20 million wind project in Ohio that would have created as many as 200 new jobs. There are currently 6,000 wind jobs in Ohio — a large number of which could be threatened if the PTC isn’t extended.

Boehner has also railed against the 1603 grant program as a “Solyndra-style stimulus program.” That program, which helped tens of thousands of renewable energy projects get developed while also creating or saving up to 75,000 jobs, allowed the industry to post solid growth during the depths of the economic slowdown.

Boehner and Romney continue to ignore the tens of thousands of green jobs in their home states in order to satisfy their false narrative that clean energy doesn’t work.

– Max Frankel