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One of my loyal readers was kind enough to bring to my attention a troubling article from the Washington Post in which a man who had earned nine green certifications and sent out hundreds of resumes still has yet to receive a single job offer.
In September, I spoke at a Woodrow Wilson Center event on green jobs for women. Most of the presenters were from nonprofit organizations that train women for green construction jobs. They all reported that their graduates were having trouble finding work.
The subject of the Washington Post article had been laid off from his job as a surveyor:
Anton has been out of work since 2008, when his job as a surveyor vanished with Florida's once-sizzling housing market.
He then retrained to do solar installation, green demolition, etc. and still could not find a job.
The Washington Post article waves a wagging finger at the green stimulus spending and the promise of green jobs:
The Obama administration channeled more than $90 billion from the $814 billion economic stimulus bill into clean energy technology, confident that the investment would grow into the economy's next big thing.
The underlying assumptions of the Washington Post article, and many others like it, are inherently flawed. You cannot wring blood from a stone. The recovery is happening slowly. Lending is still very tight, meaning that it is difficult to get building projects -- green or otherwise -- financed. In other words, it's the economy, stupid.
The problem for Mr. Anton is not that he retrained green. Indeed, his odds of finding a job actually went up through his retraining. According to the Pew Charitable trust:
[B]etween 1998 and 2007, clean energy economy jobs -- a mix of white- and blue-collar positions, from scientists and engineers to electricians, machinists and teachers -- grew by 9.1 percent, while total jobs grew by only 3.7 percent. And although we expect job growth in the clean energy economy to have declined in 2008, experts predict the drop in this sector will be less severe than the drop in U.S. jobs overall.
Mr. Anton, and millions of others like him, are out of work not because the promise of a green economy failed, but because the economy failed.
If green industry cannot
If green industry cannot stand on its own merits but needs "government mandates" to help make it more scuccessful, what good is that? If you can't sell it based on price and performance (Value) alone, why should anyone buy it??
Wasn't there just an article
Wasn't there just an article on the Shortage of GHG professionals? I am proud to say that I've survived through several big economic turn downs and my career has evolved along the way. It's up to each of us to dust of our resume and figure out where to bring value.
Simple answer to your subject
Simple answer to your subject title that would be all you needed to write. The 'free market', i.e. ronnynomics, so called capitalism is working just as it was forecast it would, No Investments from the top where the cash flows been going, not as the con was sold. But 'green' has been a boom to the higher education industry, while experienced trades people are sitting on our butts!
A big flaw of the WP article
A big flaw of the WP article is the lack of true statistics about green jobs. The US Bureau of Labor Stats (BLS) came up with an official definition of green job only recently, and is in the process of "counting" green jobs. The state of NY announced a few days ago an initiative to count green jobs (see http://www.thegreenjobbank.com/stories/new-york-state-launches-green-job...). A few other states are doing the same.
Another question to ask is what is the place of the green economy in the overall economy. If it's 5% of GDP (this just is a wild guess, just to make the point), even if green jobs are created 3 times faster than other types of jobs, we're not talking about a lot of jobs in the absolute. Geographical considerations should also be taken into account... Florida is not the best example of a recovering economy!
Another important factor in the creation of green jobs is how the government is spending the stimulus money. More of it is used to help large-scale projects (solar and wind power generation) and the manufacturing sector than consumer purchases of solar panels. Rather than looking for a solar installer job in Florida, Mr. Anton could apply for a job at Abound Solar in Indiana. The company just announced the building of a new plant to manufacture thin-film solar modules, and will be creating 1,000 jobs there (these are truly "green" jobs). Another good example is the building of a 250 mega-watt solar plant in California partially financed by the DoE; that's not going to help residential solar installers.
The choice of what type of "green" professional training to go for is not that simple!
I have a whole discussion on my website on how the government could better spend money to stimulate the creation of green jobs.