Turbines
at the Colorado Highlands Wind Farm in Fleming, Colorado. Wind
technicians were forecast to be the country’s fastest-growing occupation
through 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
If the U.S. wants to extend economic growth, it should double
down on cleaning up the environment and fighting climate change, which
are fueling both jobs and revenue, according to a new analysis by
University College London researchers.
“Don’t listen to the political rhetoric,” said Mark Maslin, a professor of geography and one of the authors behind the study published Tuesday. “Just
look at the data and be hard-nosed about it, and say, ‘Okay, if we’re
going to support the economy and make it grow and have lots of
employment, this is where I need to invest.’”
For years, there’s been a major technical difficulty with
charting progress in the “green economy:” the U.S. doesn’t measure it.
Part of the blame lies with Congress, which as part of 2013 budget
cuts eliminated funding for data-collection on “green goods and
services.”
Ever since, analysts have tried (with increasingly thinner
results) to read trends from aging data or invent new ways to measure
green industries. Others have focused on the rise in
clean-energy-related jobs put out by the U.S. Department of Energy or
state sources, but those fail to provide the whole picture.
Workers install solar panels at a home in Lafayette, California.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
That’s
why Maslin and lead author Lucien Georgeson accumulated their own data
on the U.S. green economy, drawing on hundreds of often private
databases containing granular, real-world business and transaction
statistics. They concluded that almost 9.5 million Americans, or about
4% of the workforce, are employed in a “green economy” that generates
$1.31 trillion in annual revenue, or about 7% of U.S. annual GDP.
That’s about 16.5% of the green economy worldwide, according to the analysis published in Palgrave Communications.
The
numbers rose more than 20% over the 2013-2016 fiscal years, led by the
renewable energy sector. Growth was also seen in already established
environmental businesses, including air pollution, recycling and waste
management, land remediation and water treatment.
What the
analysis calls “low-carbon” sectors—including electric vehicles, energy
efficiency, and green finance—are making an up-and-coming contribution
as well.
When the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics collected data on
the nation’s green economy, it did so through a survey of businesses,
which left judgment of what’s green to respondents. By using transaction
data, the researchers said they are able to determine what fraction of a
company’s sales are green. Their bottom-up, transaction-based method
also makes it much easier to compare nations’ various efforts.
The
U.S. is ahead of China and other nations, but its lead may not last as
other nations align national and state-level policies with green growth.
Next steps for the research include updating the findings beyond 2016,
and eventually applying their database-diving approach to assemble a
better picture of global green trade.
(Updates
to add methodology in penultimate paragraph. An earlier version
corrected the total dollar value of the “Green Economy” from study.)
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