As President-elect Obama prepares to take office, the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) has this week warned that a lack of action has already affected the potential for green job creation in the long-term, potentially robbing the country of almost three million jobs.
The organisation yesterday released its second report, Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency: Economic Drivers for the 21st Century, outlining the potential for job creation in both the renewable energy sector, and the much broader energy efficiency industry.
The report highlighted three scenarios, depending on how aggressive job creation strategies are: a base, 'business as usual' option, a moderate scenario, and an advanced one. In all three, the economic significance of the energy efficiency category outweighed that of the renewable energy one.
Roger Bezdeck, principal investigator at Management Information Services and an author of the report, warned that the potential job gains from these areas were already falling due to a lack of government support.
Comparing this year's report to its predecessor, issued a year ago, he said that a failure to stimulate the green jobs market over the last twelve months had already impacted the potential for green collar job creation. The initial report, released in November 2007 had put the the number of jobs within these two categories at between 16 million and 40 million, depending on which scenario public policy followed. However, the top-end prediction for new jobs created by 2030 fell to 37 million in the latest report.
"Every year you lose in the beginning, from 2007-2010, has a highly disproportionate negative impact at the end," he concluded, arguing that there was now an urgent need for more investment in green job schemes. "That's why our forecast for 2030 this year is less than it was for last year."
However, the report did find that the green jobs market is still growing rapidly. It said that in 2006, the energy efficiency and renewables accounted for 8.5 million jobs in the US, with energy efficiency dwarfing renewable energy by a factor of 18. By 2007, the total figure had risen around six per cent to just over 9 million.
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