Green jobs in a green economy?
There’s an interesting article on Fast Company giving three estimations of the potential for new green jobs by 2020:
- 2.7m in the EU according to Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council (EREC)
- 10m globally according to the Climate Group
- 30m globally according to the Global Climate Network (actually 40m new jobs but 10m lost ‘brown’ jobs)
So plenty of jobs, even if the estimations vary widely. The latter two depend on China going green big time, which it claims it will do but there is a lack of clarity over how this will happen in practice.
There has always been a lot of confusion and blether about how to create green jobs. People build centres of excellence (can you create a centre of excellence?) and green business parks (most of which fail, but that’s another story), but there is only one thing which will make a difference.
Renewable energy capacity in the UK surged 19% in 2008 and global renewables investment exceeded that in fossil fuels for the first time ever. Create that sort of demand and the supply and the jobs will follow. The rest, at best, will just facilitate change, not drive it.