GREEN jobs are high on the political agenda this month. Premier Anna Bligh is spruiking her ability to create them as she campaigns for re-election in Queensland. Federal Climate Change Minister Penny Wong has been deriding Coalition criticism of the feared impact of emissions trading on jobs in the energy and manufacturing sectors, saying the Opposition "does not want to talk about the jobs that will be lost if we do not act on climate change; it does not want to talk about the jobs forgone".
Greens Senator Christine Milne has been talking up the Obama rhetoric about creating green jobs in the US and urging the Rudd Government to invest in training programs to transition workers from "polluting industries" to "clean industries".
But a new US study claims that prospects for green jobs are being grossly overhyped.
Undertaken at the Institute for Energy Research by a group including Andrew Morriss of the University of Illinois and Roger Meiners of the University of Texas-Arlington, the study argues that organisations such as the UN Environment Program, the US Conference of Mayors and the American Solar Energy Society have all "overhyped the potential to create good jobs" and overlooked the job losses in conventional industries.
This has drawn a defensive reply from the pro-green Centre for American Progress, which claimed in the US presidential campaign that two million jobs could be created over just two years with $US100 billion in government funding. Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow at the centre, responds it only set out to look at stimulus money, not the overall effects of an emissions trading scheme on the US economy. Read more...