Can the government create green jobs?

The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert profiles Van Jones, the activist with a gift for getting attention to advance a green jobs agenda. The appeal clearly widens the environmental tent beyond the “nearly ninety percent white, mostly college-educated, higher-income, and over thirty-five” set that defines the current eco-base.

While Kolbert doesn’t run any numbers — how many workers will it take, for example, to retrofit office buildings? — she does add a contrarian note. “The basic premise of Jones’s appeal—that combatting global warming is a good way to lift people out of poverty—is very much open to debate,” she writes. A gasoline or carbon tax would fall disproportionately on the poor (which is why politicians are now talking about offseting the cost with tax breaks). Plus, “it’s not at all clear that the number of jobs created by, say, an expanding solar industry would be greater than the number lost through, say, a shrinking coal-mining industry. Nor is it clear that a green economy would be any better at providing work for the chronically unemployed than our present, ‘gray’ economy has been.”

That is remininscent of the financial rescue packages coming fast and furious out of Washington where the outcome is cloudy (Detroit bailout anyone?). But when is there really ever clarity on policy, if it hasn’t been tried before? Companies aren’t debating these issues any longer. Rather they are lining up lobbyists on K St. to shape the green package that’s emerging so that, yes, they may win incentives to create jobs too.

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