Just recently, United States President, Donald Trump signed an executive order, which mainly seeks to overturn his predecessor, Barrack Obama’s Clean Power Plan.
To recall, then President Obama announced the Clean Power Plan in August 2015 in response to the growing clamor to address climate change. The Plan’s primary objective is to reduce carbon pollution from power plants. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) subsequently issued the Carbon Pollution Standards, the first U.S. national standard on pollution.
Trump’s EO will trigger the review of the US Clean Power Plan and carbon standards for new coal plants. News reports, however, note, that it is unclear if the US will keep its commitment to made in COP 21 agreement to keep the world’s average temperature below two centigrade above pre-industrial levels.
Reports also quoted Trump as saying that his order is about “ending the theft of prosperity” as the signing of the EO will “start a new era of production and job creation,” particularly in the coal and mining sector.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that the new US President is ignoring the actions and calls of the global community to work double time to mitigate the effects of climate change. After all, he has promised to bring coal mining jobs back while dismissing climate change as “a hoax created by the Chinese” during his presidential bid.
More details are yet to be released on the full impact of this new executive order. But as early as now, environmental activists are already criticizing Trump for going backward on the progress already made by the US in fighting climate change. The U.S, once considered as the leading country in the world’s quest for a cleaner and greener world is now seemingly going backward.
I also join the many others who question Trump’s move in signing such an E.O. as Trump seemed to have ignored that cleaner forms of energy, do generate jobs. Many jobs in fact.
Weeks before Trump signed his controversial order, the US Department of Energy (DOE) released a report showing the contribution of the renewable energy (DOE) sector in jobs creation in the country.
The US, Energy and Employment Report revealed that solar power employs the most workers in the US Electric Power generation industry with wind energy is the third biggest. Solar alone provided work for 43 percent of the sector’s employees with 374,000 individuals from 2015 to 2016. In contrast, traditional fossil fuels all together just hired 22 percent of the workforce at 187, 117 for the same period. Coal’s job figures have been on the decline for the past decade the report stressed.
And renewables’ contribution to the additional employment in the power sector is not to be ignored either. The Energy Sector’s contribution to the overall job generation is significant as it accounts for some additional 300,000 jobs, which is 14 percent of the US job growth in 2016.
Plus, RE’s job growth is significant as it increased by 25 percent, creating a total of 73,000 new jobs last year. Wind power employment alone grew by 32 percent.
The growth of the renewables has been significant in the past decade as more energy are generated from these sources the report stressed: “The electric generation mix in the United States is changing, driven by the transition of coal-fired power plants to natural gas and the increase in low-carbon sources of energy.”
The study pointed out that generation from coal sources has dropped by 53 percent from 2006 to September 2016 while solar power alone has increased by 5000 percent in the same period.
And with the stellar growth of cleaner energy, jobs are still created.
“These shifts in electric generation source are mirrored in the sector’s changing employment profile, as the share of natural gas, solar, and wind workers increases, while coal mining and other related employment is declining.”
Solar alone provided work for 43 percent of the sector’s employees with 374,000 from 2015-2016. Photo c/o http://www.zmescience.com
Trump stressed during the signing of the report that the main thrust of the EO was to protect American jobs. But apparently, the above numbers released by the U.S. DOE shows that adding cleaner forms of energy in the mix does not necessarily translate into the loss of jobs. Renewable power generation also requires manpower.
The US DOE study isn’t the only one that talks about job generation in the RE sector. Earlier studies have already established that increasing investments in renewables will generate employment.
Research by the University of California, Berkeley has shown that “photovoltaic technology produces more jobs per unit of electricity than any other energy source. Most of the jobs are in construction and installation of solar facilities and can’t be outsourced to other countries.”
Similarly, the report of the University of Massachusetts, “The Economic Benefits of Investing in Clean Energy in the US” stressed that a total of $150 billion of investments in clean energy would produce some 2.5 new million jobs.
Inevitably, these numbers point to one thing: Clean energy generates jobs. Choosing cleaner forms of energy does not come at the expense of the workers. On the contrary, more employment opportunities are available as we grow the RE sector.
Industry experts are bewildered on how Trump will deliver his promise of bringing more jobs to the coal industry. Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, says that it is impossible to bring back coal jobs. “There isn’t a lot of investment activity because in some cases it looks more economically attractive for firms to invest in cleaner technologies.”
Additionally, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis or IEEFA, in its 2017 U.S. Coal Outlook stressed that job losses would continue for coal industry as companies will continue to use fewer workers in the future: Promises to create more coal jobs will not be kept — indeed the industry will continue to cut payrolls.”
Plus, the IEEFA sees that natural gas will soon replace coal, which makes it almost impossible to for Trump to achieve his goal: “Trump’s false promise that he can bring back coal is really exposed as so much coal dust and mirrors by this executive order, since utilities will continue to use natural gas instead of coal.”
Sadly, the US President didn’t look at these numbers nor listened to industry experts.
References:
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/27/politics/trump-climate-change-executive-order/
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-energy-idUSKBN16Z1L6
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/01/f34/2017%20US%20Energy%20and%20Jobs%20Report_0.pdf
https://www.epa.gov/cleanpowerplan/fact-sheet-overview-clean-power-plan
Green is Gold: How renewable energy can save us money and generate jobs”. Greenpeace
Note: UCLA Berkeley & University of Massachusetts studies are cited from the Greenpeace report.
GAAD THINKS 