Carl Pope: Doubling Down on Green Jobs

Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, argues that it’s time we “double down” on our bet with a clean energy future by demanding from Obama not 5 million new jobs in green technology, but 10 million:

Increasingly, wind entrepreneurs and union leaders alike are alerting us that unless we do renewable energy at a big-enough national scale, the supply chains that build solar and wind technologies won’t be built in the U.S., with the jobs and prosperity that would bring, but instead will be shifted to Europe and Asia. We’re betting tens of billions on the U.S. auto companies leading the world into an electric future, but we’re making only a fraction of the investment in new battery technologies that the Chinese are.

And we know that it’s doing things big that transforms labor markets and ends unemployment. Yes, ten million new clean-energy jobs sounds like a lot — but if it enabled us to end our imported-oil habit, which costs us $700 billion a year, we could pay every one of those new workers $70,000 a year.

via Carl Pope: Doubling Down on Green Jobs.