October 22nd, 2008 · No Comments

By John DeFore

Anyone skeptical about talk of “green jobs” this campaign season might take note of a new report in which economists, not politicians, find that three decades of green policies in California have created about 1.5 million jobs. Some energy jobs were lost along the way as well. But the authors found that: “For every new job foregone in these sectors, however, more than 50 new jobs have been created across the state’s diverse economy.”

Written by David Roland-Holst of Berkeley’s Center for Energy, Resources, and Economic Sustainability (CERES), the report is intended to help decision makers gauge the economic impact of enforcing the emission-reduction goals of a 2006 California law called the Global Warming Solutions Act.

In a summary of the study (the paper can be downloaded at the CERES home page), Roland-Holst says that the current global financial crisis only makes such data more important, as citizens worry about enacting any policy that appears to have an economic downside.

The analysis dug deep — looking at historical amounts spent by households on energy and tables of employment figures over the three decades-plus that California has worked to buck national energy-usage trends — and found good economic news. Today, Californians demand 40% less energy per capita than the national average, but the dollars citizens saved on energy were redirected into other spending, according to the CERES report.

Not only did this re-directed spending create jobs, but more jobs were created at an increasing rate. As the paper puts it, “the economic benefits of energy efficiency innovation have a compounding effect. The first 1.4 percent of annual efficiency gain produced about 181,000 additional jobs, while an additional one percent yielded 222,000 more.”

Using historical data to project the future impact of new regulations, the authors say, “we find that the proposed package of (California’s) policies…achieves 100 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets” while “increasing the Gross State Product (GSP) by about $76 billion, increasing real household incomes by up to $48 billion.”

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