Special Series
Green-Collar Jobs: Realizing the Promise
In a Series
Green-Collar Jobs, Redefined and Recounted
Last week, Eric Hess summarized the best tally of green-collar jobs in the United States. This new study, published by the Pew Charitable Trusts (pdf), mined and combined a set of commercial databases, some of them enormous, to identify clean-energy companies (and businesses with other environmental aims such as water conservation and pollution reduction) in one of the United States. It then confirmed the categorization with a custom-designed web-search tool. The activities these companies perform were similar to those in last month’s Washington study: energy efficiency, renewables, water conservation, waste recycling, pollution mitigation. This methodology yielded a ten-year time series of counts of green businesses and employees.
Unfortunately, the two studies diverge sharply about how many green jobs Washington has. The first study found 47,194; the second found 17,013.
The Population Taboo
The hot-button topic of population growth is feared and avoided by politicians and enviro-minded folks alike. Contraception, abortion, family planning, religious beliefs -- yikes! Even if you believe that curbing procreation is key to solving our environmental and climate woes, who'd want to touch that powder keg of issues? But Robert Engelman in the current issue of Scientific American says it doesn't need to be that way, and in fact, if we really want to shrink human reproduction rates, those are the wrong things to focus on.
Before we even get to discussing population growth, we seem to get tangled up and sidetracked in talk about consumption rates. The idea is that while families in poor, developing nations usually have more children, they consume so much less energy, food, water, and other resources per person than developed countries that what we really need to deal with is cutting consumption rates in rich countries. That's true, but it's not the whole story.
