A scary realization came to me while thinking about my children’s future the other day. There’s no guarantee of jobs for all the people in the world. As a global trading network, we may have become so efficient in making shoes, shirts, and automobiles that there’s no need for everyone to manufacture things or even to serve each other any longer. A “jobless recovery” they call it. What kind of recovery is that?

The New York Times points out in a recent editorial (NYT, October 4, 2009) that the continuous job losses in the U.S. are unprecedented since 1939. We have lost jobs for 21 straight months, a total of 7.2 million since December 2007. But this doesn’t even count the poor folks who have dropped out of the system, after searching for 27 weeks and given up hope. Last month they amounted to 571,000 more people—those who are no longer captured in the “unemployment” statistics. Officially, unemployment is now at 9.8% or 15.1 million people. But if one actually computes the “employment rate” as all those who have a job divided by the sum of those employed AND those who would like to have a job (if one were available), we are down to only 58.8% employment, the lowest percentage in more than 25 years. That sounds like 41.2% unemployment to me. There’s no dignity in joblessness. Will we ever be able to replace these jobs, or is this the structural unemployment that economists have long warned us about?

I am reminded of Joseph Schumpeter, 1883−1950, Austrian-born Harvard economics professor, who invented the notion of “creative destruction”. Creative destruction holds that wealth is created by the natural periodic erasure of old production systems and replacement with something better. Thus, Schumpeter would reason that transitioning from the fossil fuel age to a system of renewable energy and efficiency is just what the doctor ordered.

It certainly seems to be the elixir for China. Hu Jintao and the People’s Party have embraced renewable energy like no other country. They are now the largest solar panel manufacturer in the world with more than 40% of the market share. China recently commissioned a U.S. company, First Solar, Inc., to build the largest solar photovoltaic power plant in the world (2000 MW) in the Inner Mongolian desert with 25 sq mi (∼65 km2) of solar panels, enough to power over 3 million homes. Further, China has doubled its nameplate capacity for wind energy in each of the last four years, and will likely pass the leading country in wind power (the U.S.) within a year or two. To illustrate how serious they are, 40% of the stimulus funds in China are devoted to investment in green technologies, while only 14% of the funds in the U.S. are so dedicated.

Not only China, but the entire world needs to create green collar jobs. I’ve seen it work in my native state of Iowa. We’ve lost thousands of jobs in appliances manufacturing and small industries, but we’ve gained 7,702 clean energy jobs since 1998, mostly in wind manufacturing, biofuels production, and as contractors for the weatherization of homes (www.pewcenteronthestates.org). In the past two years in Iowa, over $149 million in venture capital funds have been invested to create these jobs. We have five wind power facilities which manufacture turbines, towers, and blades—and more are on the way. And Iowa is just average in terms of inducing jobs from the New Economy. Certainly, green jobs are not the entire answer to our nation’s unemployment problem, but the sector is growing much faster than others and it constitutes a light at the end of the tunnel that we should harness.

That’s the hope and promise for the meetings in Copenhagen this December to replace the 1997 Kyoto Climate Treaty which was not ratified by the U.S. As of this writing, the U.S. again does not have serious support from the Senate needed to ratify a new treaty. But on their side, supporters have the dramatically changing climate, the logic of creative destruction, and senators’ strong desire for greater energy independence. For example, we could replace our fleet of automobiles with hybrid and electric vehicles (creating jobs), fill their lithium-ion batteries (research and jobs) with wind power at night (wind manufacturing jobs) and solar power during the day (solar industry jobs), while solving the energy security problem of imported oil. That’s a powerful impetus. Jobs, energy independence, and greenhouse gas emissions reduction in one fell swoop.

There’s more good news. Once wind and solar energy comes on line, we will no longer suffer the vagaries of price fluctuations and cartels as we do with oil and natural gas. Who owns the wind and the sun? No one ... we all do. The sun always rises in the east, and the wind will always blow from high pressure to low. These energy sources fluctuate with earth’s predictable periodicities, which is much different from the oil economy. Solar and wind power create a cleaner, healthier life on this planet.

Joseph Schumpeter was right. Renewable energy is creative destruction just when we need it most. And green jobs are the result.

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