Qualified good news.

Katie Fehrenbacher wrote 12 July 2011 for gigaom, The clean economy employs more workers than fossil fuels,

The green technology and clean power industries are currently employing more workers than their dirty fossil fuel peers. That’s according to a report released from the Brookings Institution, which has crunched the numbers of jobs created in the U.S. by sectors like solar, wind, waste water recycling, public transportation and energy efficiency retrofits.

Qualified because Brookings includes not only wastewater and mass transit (good stuff, albeit a bit odd fit) but also biomass (ick).

However, even during the recession,

…newer clean economy establishments— especially those in young energy-related segments such as wind energy, solar PV, and smart grid—added jobs at a torrid pace, albeit from small bases.

Not just jobs, but good-paying jobs:

The clean economy offers more opportunities and better pay for low- and middle-skilled workers than the national economy as a whole. Median wages in the clean economy—meaning those in the middle of the distribution—are 13 percent higher than median U.S. wages. Yet a disproportionate percentage of jobs in the clean economy are staffed by workers with relatively little formal education in moderately well-paying “green collar” occupations.

Yeah, but what does that mean to us? See next post.

-jsq

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