I’ve talked before in this space about the importance of the “green jobs” movement, so I wanted to take a moment and recommend to you a new report from the Center for American Progress titled “Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy” that puts forward some specific proposals on how we could build an economic recovery that is good for both workers and the environment.
The report proposes an $100 billion economic stimulus program focusing on six areas: retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient, expanding mass transit and freight rail, rewiring the electrical grid with “smart” transmission systems, expanding wind power, expanding solar power, and expanding use of advanced biofuels. The authors say that this kind of targeted investment could create 2 million jobs over the next two years, while simultaneously moving us toward a cleaner, more sustainable economy.
$100 billion may sound like a lot, but consider that this year’s economic stimulus is projected to cost more than that — $125 billion over the next decade (PDF) — and it did nothing to get us on the road to a low-emissions economy, and very little to get workers back to work again (as evidenced by the eight-month stretch of continuously rising unemployment we’ve seen in America). So anything that gets our political leaders thinking about smarter ways to get the economy moving again is worth a look in my book.