Green Collar Sector: The New Apollo

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There is a saying in politics: jobs, jobs, jobs.

In this election cycle, all eyes are on "green collar" jobs. Creating more of these are at the top of the political and economic agenda.
The New York Times (below) recently tried to sort out the facts and fantasies regarding the much lauded new green jobs sector.

In the end, politicians and most middle class people like investment, but they love jobs. Constituents with jobs are more inclined to love their elected ones in return.

Green collar is a 3-way win...jobs, global warming mitigation and investment return for Wall Street.
There is a 4th element for green collar workers. NYT reports that workers take pride in their contribution to society and America.
The Candidates and America need to deliver on all 4 fronts right now. As the name Apollo Alliance intends, Green is the New Apollo Program for evolving the US job and economic base.





Source: New York Times online

"Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, said: “A green job has to do something useful for people, and it has to be helpful to, or at least not damaging to, the environment.”

It can be difficult to parse the difference between green- and blue-collar jobs. Dave Foster, executive director of the Blue Green Alliance, a partnership between the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club, pointed to workers who mine iron ore in Minnesota and ship it to steel mills in Indiana. “Ten years ago, that steel was used for making low-efficiency automobiles, so those jobs were part of the dirty economy,” he said. “But now that steel is being used to build wind turbines. So now you can call them green jobs.”

But to Andrew W. Hannah, chief executive of Plextronics, a start-up in Pittsburgh, green-collar jobs often have little relation to their blue-collar counterparts. His company produces high-tech polymer inks that are used to make electronic circuitry for solar panels. Of the company’s 51 employees, 20 have Ph.D.’s in fields like physics, chemistry and material science.

It is hard to gauge the number of green-collar jobs nationwide. Welders at a wind-turbine factory are viewed as having green jobs, but what about the factory’s accountant or its janitors? Workers with Sustainable South Bronx, a nonprofit group that plants vegetation to keep the area cooler and reduce air-conditioning demands, would seem to fit the bill. But so would the employees of Tesla Motors, south of San Francisco, who are producing an all-electric Roadster that sells for $98,000.

In the most-often-cited estimate, a report commissioned by the American Solar Energy Society said that the nation had 8.5 million jobs in renewable energy or energy efficient industries. And Jerome Ringo, president of the Apollo Alliance, predicted that the nation could generate three million to five million more green jobs over the next 10 years." MORE...go to headline