With US job creation stalling this past June, Americans and businesses around the world are looking everywhere to find the solution to their economic woes. The past few months have been filled with much talk in the media about the high tech sector being an exciting new way to bring in jobs, as six of the top ten valuable brands in 2011, including Apple, Google, and Microsoft, belong to that sector. Though these types of companies have been receiving a fair amount of buzz, the media has often overlooked one of the greatest possibilities for economic growth: the energy sector.

Seven of the ten largest international companies are from the energy sector, posting revenues in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Much of our energy in the United States is imported from abroad, and of these foreign sources of energy, like the Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada, are highly unsustainable. In tandem, these mean two things. First, the energy sources are on a dead-end trajectory, and secondly, the United States will have a difficult time controlling their prices.

Developing disruptive energies is our biggest opportunity for pushing for energy independence. As the energy sector is huge on American and foreign soil, it is our mission as a nation to turn this opportunity into a new industrial power. Jobs come from emerging technologies that are made widely available to the masses. While certainly still very important to our economy, the software and Internet industry has already seen this boom. The industry is of course never static and continually producing new ideas and technologies, but it is a more mature, developed industry.

Jobs are and will continue to be in the emerging energy sector. In May of 2010, the American Solar Energy Society published a report on green-collar jobs in the United States. Its key conclusions reverberate much of the buzz over clean technologies. More than 9 million jobs in 2007 were in the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries, and this number could increase to up to 37 million jobs by the year 2030, representing roughly 17% of expected US employment. Jobs would be present for all sorts of skills and levels of education: engineers, electricians, welders, metal workers, accountants, environmental scientists, factory workers, and many more.

However, creating more efficient energy is not enough to keep jobs in the United States. Rather, revolutionary energies and technologies that are unique to American innovation will truly bring and retain an optimal amount of both maintenance and high-skilled jobs and resources to the United States. The computer and American software companies would not be where they are today if it weren’t for the Space Race in the 1960s. If the US had not invested so heavily in computers and technology, they would have never reached the moon nor would have created the high level of technological sophistication we see today in American software products. The same phenomenon can happen with American disruptive energies.

Related posts: