Clean-energy research and engineering posts could be poised for a growth spurt in the United States if a predicted 'green-job' explosion becomes reality. But some critics suggest that green jobs — those with a role in reducing waste and pollution and benefiting the environment — are replacing other jobs and are costly to create.

Credit: SOURCE: PEW CHARITABLE TRUSTS

The Clean Energy Economy, released on 10 June by the Pew Charitable Trusts, based in Washington DC, and Climate 2030: A National Blueprint for a Clean Energy Economy, released last month by the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are enthusiastic about the effect of clean energy on the US economy and about the potential for job growth. A related document from the Union of Concerned Scientists, Clean Power, Green Jobs, predicts that some 297,000 new green jobs will be created in sectors such as agriculture, forestry, manufacturing and construction by 2025. And the Pew report counted 770,000 existing green jobs in the United States as of 2007.

The Pew report, which claims to be the first analysis to count actual jobs, business and investments for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, notes that venture-capital investments in clean technology plunged 48% in the first quarter of 2009 compared with the same period the year before, but points out that that's still better than the 61% drop seen across all sectors. Clean-technology growth has varied widely from state to state, the report found. Nineteen states had more than the 2007 national average of 15,106 clean-energy jobs (referred to as 'large' states on map, below), and 18 'fast-growing' states had average annual growth between 1998 and 2007 that was above the national average of 1.9%.

Manufacturing gains

Representatives from both organizations agree that green-job growth is most likely to occur in the manufacturing and construction sectors, although they predict expansion in science and engineering research positions as well. Kil Huh, project director of research at the Pew Center on the States in Washington DC and lead researcher on the report, cannot estimate how many of the green jobs in the report are in science or science research. But he says that clean energy, energy efficiency and environmentally friendly production are magnets for venture capital and federal fiscal-stimulus investment, which, he predicts, will generate new research positions.

But economist Roger Meiners, a senior fellow with the Property & Environment Research Center, an environmental think tank based in Bozeman, Montana that in May published 7 Myths About Green Jobs, says that green jobs actually cost the economy. The report says that in Spain, for example, each green job created has destroyed 2.2 existing jobs in other sectors.

The report says green-job outlays take resources from other sectors, raise energy prices, and encourage companies to move production facilities to lower-cost nations.

Meiners says building and construction, not research, is the focus of nearly all green jobs. “Most federal funds are designed to force construction of wind and sun technology,” says Meiners. But Jeff Deyette, an energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, points to a clean-energy bill that is currently under congressional review. If passed, billions of dollars in federal funding will be directed to science research in clean energy and clean technology over the next several decades. Research targets such as wave power and hydrokinetics, nanotechnology and photovoltaic-cell technology are likely to receive federal funding, he says.