NEWS

Union, advocacy groups to tout home-grown ‘green jobs’

04/09/2008

Michael Burnham, E&ENews PM senior reporter

The United Steelworkers, Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council launched the "Green Jobs for America" coalition today in 12 states to boost U.S. renewable energy supply and demand.

The nonprofits’ campaign will wrap up less than a month before Election Day, and several of the dozen states it is targeting are political battlegrounds. Even so, organizers of the environmental-business coalition say Green Jobs for America is all about education.

Between now and Sept. 15, coalition organizers plan to host education events and publish reports that will explain how domestic production and installation of greenhouse-gas-free renewable energy technologies could create domestic jobs and mitigate climate change.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the coalition cannot lobby lawmakers to pass legislation. But Green Jobs for America is free to educate the people who put those lawmakers in office, underscored Josh Dorner, a Sierra Club spokesman.

"This isn’t an electoral or political program," Dorner explained. "This is to educate people about the breadth of what a green job is."

The coalition will conduct its education efforts in Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin. The states were chosen because they are positioned best to benefit from green jobs creation, Dorner said.

A study commissioned last year by the Sierra Club and United Steelworkers’ Blue Green Alliance suggested that the dozen states stand to gain about 263,000 manufacturing jobs in the wind and solar parts industries alone over a decade. The figure assumes that the United States opts to stabilize carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere by adding 18,500 megawatts of renewable energy projects annually for a decade.

And that is where the coalition’s grass-roots work could be of help. In addition to hosting public education events and publishing additional jobs reports, coalition organizers plan to circulate a petition that would call for green jobs, fair-trade agreements and clean-energy solutions such as renewable portfolio standards.

"With the economy the way it is, any sort of job that keeps people employed here in America is good," said Jenny Powers, an NRDC spokeswoman in New York.

Amid all of the recessionary hand-wringing, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton is making green-collar jobs a focal point on the campaign trail. Last week in Pittsburgh, the New York senator unveiled an "insourcing" agenda that she said would provide $7 billion in tax incentives and investments to help U.S. companies create high-paying jobs.

Under the agenda’s $500 million "Made in America" fund, renewable energy companies would be eligible to receive awards that cover up to 30 percent of the costs of engineering, retooling or constructing manufacturing facilities.