Twenty years ago, “green” meant real environmental issues, such as clean air, water, and land. It meant protecting species, wise land usage, refoliation, stopping deforestation, replacing dirty with clean. Now it means climate alarmism, and it is failing: Training for Green Jobs Is the Easy Part
Joliet (Ill.) is discovering what cities across the U.S. have found: Declaring that a city is going to replace yesterday’s lost jobs with new green ones is a lot easier than actually doing so. Cities from Tulsa to Honolulu proclaim themselves destined to become leaders in green jobs, a broad classification for work tied to renewable energy and energy efficiency that includes insulators and solar-panel installers.
The mayor of Philadelphia has said his city was also destined to be a green Mecca. In New York, Democratic Rep. Steve Israel of Long Island declared his “mission to make New York the green-jobs capital of America.” Public officials in Los Angeles, San Jose, Calif., and Northern Virginia also said their communities could be green-job hubs.
Over-wrought “green jobs” leaders are finding out that their intentions rarely result in actual accomplishments. But, hey, with Democrats, intentions count for more than results.
President Barack Obama wants to create five million green jobs in the next decade, and earmarked a chunk of the $787 billion stimulus package to that end. The funds are just starting to flow. In January the administration unveiled $100 million in job-training grants to help struggling steelworkers in Minnesota, dislocated factory workers in Oregon and others make the transition into careers in renewable energy.
Sounds great! Training to perform jobs that mostly do not exist. That should help the unemployment rate.
Now, there are some green jobs out there, and moving towards cleaner renewable energy is a worthy goal. What Democrats miss is that there needs to actual be heavy research and development into these energy sources before there can actually be jobs building and deploying them. Shocker!
Interestingly, all these “green jobs” plans seem to revolve around turning everyone into an assembly line worker. Where are the white collar jobs?
