Changing Planet: Clean Energy and Green Jobs

The green economy is both celebrated as a thriving sector that will drive job growth and dismissed as an overhyped myth that will never employ as many people as fossil fuels do today. Competing sets of data support both points of view. According to the American Petroleum Institute, oil and natural gas directly or indirectly employ 8 million workers in the United States. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute counts 900,000 workers in the renewable energy industry, although the reported rate of job growth in that sector is two and a half times the rate in the economy at large.

Clouding the debate is disagreement over the exact definition of the green economy. Brookings Institution researchers recently defined green jobs as those that produce goods or services benefiting the environment and came up with significantly different numbers. They estimated that the green economy supports 2.7 million employees, about 2 percent of the workforce. They also found that some 130,000 people are directly employed in renewable energy, compared with 2.4 million in the fossil fuel industry.

No matter who is doing the counting, renewable energy clearly makes up only a small fraction of the energy economy in the United States. But Dan Kammen, chief technical specialist on renewable energy and energy efficiency for the World Bank, says there could be big advantages to getting on the renewable energy train now. According to Kammen, renewable energy technologies, such as solar, can generate up to five times as many jobs per unit of energy as fossil fuels can. “Not because they are better or worse,” he says, “but simply because they’re new.” For instance, by investing in solar technologies now, China has jobs in research and development that will no longer exist when the industry matures.

In July, the Brookings Institution and Battelle’s Technology Partnership Practice released a comprehensive report on the state of the green economy in the U.S. By their count, the country's green workers numbered 2.7 million, more than those employed in fossil fuels, and median wages were 13% higher than wages in the rest of the economy. Green jobs tend to cluster around cities, and looking at the fields those jobs are in—transport, manufacturing, architecture, and more—reveals insights into each city's approach to greening its economy. Check out their interactive map to see how your metropolitan area stacks up.