Renewable Energy Job Creation
I had a very interesting meeting yesterday in Washington D.C. at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill with Randy Flood, a fellow who’s been an important part of the law-making process at the federal level since the early 1970s. The content of the talk centered largely around a subject of terrific importance: renewable energy job creation. In particular, Randy has put his finger on the concept, and I believe he’s correct, that selling renewable energy as a valid industry is equivalent to saying that there are a ton of well-paying jobs associated with it.
And how difficult a concept is that to accept? Or, put another way, which of these two propositions do you find more credible?
A) Even though process automation (not solar and wind energy) has been the demise of a great number of coal mining jobs, we need to somehow find a way to put them all back to work in the mines.
or
B) Since the world is clearly moving in the direction of deriving its energy from the sun, an unending torrent of new career opportunities will come from deploying all the associated technologies: PV, concentrated solar power, wind, biomass, hydro, geothermal, energy storage, smart grid, electric transportation, etc.
Look, we’re all sympathetic to the plight of families that have been mining coal for generations, but someone’s simply going to have to tell them the bad news: the coal industry is going away. The fate of everyone living on this planet is at stake. And keep in mind that it’s not just renewable energy advocates that are saying that coal is dead; your very own people are saying essentially the same. Have you noticed that the Center for Energy Workforce Development talks about oil and gas (and nuclear) but doesn’t mention coal anymore?
And speaking of evaluating certain propositions, here’s another one that seems a bit tough to defend: The consumption of all fossil fuels is causing climate change, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, lung disease, etc., yet we must ignore all this and put even more manpower behind the industry of extracting, refining, and burning them.
But here’s the flip side: We’ll happily take the folks coming out of the coal mines and off the oil rigs, and train them to take part in the new energy industry. We need them.
