So much of the talk about satisfying America's energy needs comes from existing fossil-fuel energy corporations, which are spending a fortune on advertising to convince people that if we try to shift to sustainable energy we will end up without energy or jobs.

If conservatives admit the truth, that the transition to a green economy will create jobs and strengthen the economy, the jig will be up for them.

Another part of the problem is that rank and file right-wingers have bought the ideological argument that environmentalists hate technological civilization and want to go back to some Rousseauist pastoral idyll.  They see arguments that sustainable energy will strengthen the economy as a subterfuge by leftist environmentalists to enact policies that, in reality, will destroy it.

Shifting to sustainable sources of energy will make the nation rich, but the traditional energy companies poorer.  They  don't want the public to understand that it's interests are not the same as those of Exxon, Peabody Energy, etc. (Have you see the "Do you own an oil company ad...?)

[Blogging for the future at Climaticide Chronicles]

"My True Religion Is Kindness" -- The Dalai Lama/---/Do you know why 350ppm is important?

Another report worth looking at was issued late last year by the American Solar Energy Society (http://www.ases.org/images/stories/ASES-JobsReport-Final. ...).

And what's true for the US is true worldwide.  See a preliminary report I have written together with colleagues at Cornell University for the UN Environment Programme, at http://www.unep.org/labour_environment/features/greenjobs ... with a summary at http://www.unep.org/labour_environment/PDFs/Green-Jobs-Ba ...). It looks at renewables and energy-intensive sectors including transportation, buildings, etc. The final version will be available this fall.

When will you idiots learn that oil is what made most people in this country and this world have the energy to move out of the mud and into decent clean sanitary living?

most of the manufacturing, design and engineering for Big Wind and Big Solar is being done overseas, with a few construction jobs and a few O & M jobs...

the greenest energy is that which you needn't ever produce.

For that reason, I'm always uncomfortable with strategies which "create jobs".  I'm more comfortable with strategies that use resources (including human labor) more efficiently, more humanely, and more sustainably.  Sometimes that will eliminate a number of less-desirable, low-skill jobs, in the name of efficiencies.  Which is OK (in my opinion), as long as the resulting societal benefits (e.g. profits) get widely shared.

The latter, of course, is the big problem.  More and more of society's profits are getting shared among a handful of obscenely wealthy owners of the means of production.  THAT is what has to be changed!

Job Opportunities for the Green Economy: A State-by-State Picture of Occupations that Gain from Green Investments
http://www.peri.umass.edu/green_jobs/

However, be careful about the "job" argument in general.  Our argument should be that right livelihood is more important than jobs.  If you just want to create jobs, you could open a baby burning factory.  Prioritizing the job issue gets you Nazi Germany if you're not very careful.

Wolverine
Try telling some guy who has a family, mortgage payments to make, food and electric bills to pay, that jobs are not important. See how "right" someone will live if he's unemployed and losing his house.

Victory in Pattani

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

"...open a baby burning factory"

How could you even mention this?  Shame.

Of course  aborted  fetuses would remove the ethical restrictions.

Biodiesel can be made from the fat.  

But if you use live babies, you would need a way to decide which babies would turn out to be bush voters before you made the selection.  That would take a time machine to look into the future.

Possible from a theoretical POV, but not yet actually built.  Maybe that's what the rapture will be like.  Jesus will burn all the bush voters as babies, that would be heaven on earth.

Population problem, solved!  Hehey.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

You missed my point, though the offensiveness of the baby burning portion obviously worked on you.  The point is that there are many environmentally and ecologically destructive jobs in this destructive society.  If "jobs" is your priority, you can easily end up with a very destructive result.  That was the point of the baby burning example, and that's the reason I chose the most offensive thing I could think of.

Mac,

As someone who had one quarter of his family killed by the Nazis, I can unequivocally say that it's far more important what people are doing than whether they're employed.  I'd much rather that those running concentration camps, and even in the German military, were unemployed than that they did what they did.  The same goes for those in jobs that are environmentally and/or ecologically destructive.