Want jobs? Invest in solar power.

There are more people in the U.S. employed in the solar energy marketplace than mining coal. The banal argument that transitioning to a clean energy economy will cost us jobs is simply false. Solar is growing more than 10 times faster than the American economy.

Solar already employs more than coal, and that gap is widening. In 2012, solar added 14,000 new jobs, up 36 percent from 2010 and the industry will add another 20,000 jobs this year. The fossil fuels industry cut 4,000 jobs last year. So when it comes to employing Americans, solar is winning.

That 119,000 jobs in the solar industry is also more than the 106,400 “production and nonsupervisory employees” in the oil and gas extraction industry, and gaining rapidly on the total of 197,500 for that industry in September 2013, according to Oil and Gas Extraction: NAICS 211″, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This is why solar is gaining jobs so fast, prices continuing to drop year on year ( Moore’s Law for solar) produces increasing solar deployment year after year like compound interest:

The people of Georgia mostly already get this, despite the mighty megaphone of the fossil fuel industry continually trying to shout down the truth.

Solar power is going to win like the Internet did.

T. Boone Pickens with his natural gas export investments in about six years could well look like Steve Ballmer after he ridiculed the iPhone in 2007. That’s Steve Ballmer former CEO of Microsoft, partly because, as he said 19 September 2013:

Mobile devices. We have almost no share.

Let me quote Thomas Alva Edison yet again:

We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. … I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.

We don’t have to wait.

-jsq

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