CHICAGO — Everywhere you turn, “green jobs” are touted for their ability to pull the nation out of its economic slump. But what exactly is a green job? Is the U.S. creating any? Do they pay?
For the first time since the term was coined, someone has answers.
A seminal study released earlier this week by the Brookings Institution defines the term and has determined where such jobs exist. The report makes it possible for policymakers to see which industries are producing such jobs and where and how the clean economy is growing.
The information is crucial to policymakers who have been throwing millions of dollars into a “green economy” with the hope that enough jobs will be created to offset the huge numbers that have been lost.
Brookings also examined green competition, not only between cities and regions but also globally, and determined that U.S. firms were losing market share to foreign competitors.
“Let’s be candid about this,” said Howard Learner, president and executive director of the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago, an environmental advocacy organization. “There are a lot of cities and lot of countries who are competing. If we’re not aggressive, other competing cities and countries will eat our lunch.”
Until the Brookings report, the term “clean economy” hadn’t been defined. That made finding, counting and nurturing green jobs difficult, if not impossible.
Brookings pulled together data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and other sources to come up with a definition. It defines clean economy as “economic activity — measured in terms of establishments and the jobs associated with them — that produces goods and services with an environmental benefit or adds value to such products using skills or technologies that are uniquely applied to those products.” The report used only “direct jobs” and defines environmental benefits as those that prevent or minimize pollution or natural resource depletion.
“The great purpose of this study is to help policymakers understand what the clean economy is, to make it clear to economic leaders what the trends are and allow them to make good economic decisions,” said Mark Muro, senior fellow and policy director at the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings and co-author of the study.
In his State of the Union address this year, President Barack Obama touted the green sector as a way to create “countless” new jobs. But without a clear definition, states set their own green standards, often at conflict with one another.
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