WASHINGTON–“Green jobs” are getting a lot of attention this election season. They can be good for creating jobs and protecting the environment– or an irresponsible misuse of taxpayer dollars— depending on which presidential candidate you believe.
But what makes a job “green”?
A recently-released briefing paper from the Economic Policy Institute makes the case that green jobs are more ubiquitous than you might think. Many of them don’t require advanced degrees, so bus drivers and construction workers can be just as much a part of the green economy as solar panel engineers or smart-grid designers. Because of this broad definition, the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows “green jobs” growing in an otherwise sluggish economy.
“When a lot of people talk about green jobs, I think what people have in mind is this green tech stuff, which is really important,” said Ethan Pollack, who wrote the briefing paper for EPI. “It is very important that we are innovating the next new technologies.”
To that end, the U.S. Chamber of commerce is calling for increased federal funding for energy innovation.
“We support investments in policies that enable the expansion of renewable energy resources and boost green job creation,” Chamber spokeswoman Sally-Shannon Birkel said in a statement.
But the green economy expanding means more jobs in blue collar professions as well as for technology innovators.
“These green tech jobs get highlighted and make people feel like they’re going to be excluded from [the green economy], when really the reverse is true. The work that we need to do to move toward a green economy is highly labor-intensive and very accessible to people that don’t have PhD’s, master’s, or even bachelor’s degrees,” Pollack said.
Energy efficiency in buildings, for example, is a portion of the green economy with a wide variety of jobs associated with it, said Laurie Leyshon, director of the nonprofit Green Trade Association.
“You can climb into attics and stuff insulation into crevices to insulate an attic or you can design a LEED Platinum building. The range is from virtually unskilled labor to the most skilled.”
Pollack says making those blue collar jobs “green” doesn’t drastically change what they’ve traditionally entailed.
“What we need is not new workers and new occupations, but rather, oftentimes, it’s just a function of retraining workers to do very similar things to what they were doing before.”
For the purpose of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report, a green job can fit one of two criteria. The first is any job that includes specific duties for the purpose of making the employer “more environmentally friendly.” These would be your company’s in-house solar panel installer, energy consultant or green-tech developer.
The Bureau also breaks down what percentage of a workplace’s goods and services benefit the environment. That percentage is then applied to the number of employees that work there, and that figure equals the number of green jobs at that workplace. So if half of Company X’s products are deemed beneficial to the environment and Company X employs 100 people, BLS counts Company X as having 50 green jobs.
That means that everyone who works for a company, from the janitor to the CEO, that produces anything environmentally-friendly, has a portion of a “green job.” That definition extends to think tanks that write reports about green jobs.
“I imagine I’d be counted as part of a green job,” Pollack said. “A share of the employment here (at EPI) would be classified as green. But I don’t know what share, and BLS did not contact us about that.”