One Million Green-Collar Jobs Planned for the UK
By The Skilled Worker
Historically, when representatives from the countries on either side of the English Channel met to discuss land it was about how to carve it up. On Thursday, we received a glimpse of the future as the United Kingdom and France focused on ways to care for the environment.
Calling for a mandate to create a vast number of green-collar jobs, UK Minister of Europe Jim Murphy and his French counterpart, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, told attendees of a roundtable discussion in London that Europe’s health depends on widescale change.
“The economic case for an urgent shift to low carbon is compelling,” Member of Parliament Murphy said during the “Towards a Green Europe” meeting. “The Stern Review found that climate change will be more devastating than both of the World Wars and the Great Depression. Ignoring it could reduce global GDP by as much as 20%.”
Murphy cited a 700-page report from former World Bank lead economist Nicholas Stern, who said the impact of climate change on global commerce has been vastly underestimated. When Stern’s report was published in 2006 he was criticized for being alarmist but in an interview with the Financial Times last month he stated his findings were too conservative in their estimate of climate change’s potential threat. “The damage risks are bigger than I would have argued,” Stern said. “We can’t be precise about what it would be like but you can say it would be a transformation.”
Stern, other economists and environmentalists advocate a rapid shift to a low-carbon society. Believing the change toward such a world is inevitable, Murphy told the roundtable the British government is targeting the addition of one million green-collar jobs to the labor force over the next two decades. The UK currently has more than 400,000 workers in green industries.
“Countries that take early action in developing green technology will have a competitive advantage as this boom industry grows in the future,” Murphy said. “The government is committed to making sure the UK is ahead of the pack - in the future we want an economy offering a mix of good blue-collar jobs, good white-collar jobs and good green-collar jobs. Our aim is to have over a million UK workers in environmental industries within the next two decades.”
France is also committed to greening its economy under president Nicolas Sarkozy, Jouyet said. Prime minister Gordon Brown championed the meeting partly because France and the United Kingdom are behind some other European countries in greening their economies. Germany is on pace to have more jobs by 2020 in environmental industries than in its car-manufacturing sector.
In other news related to green jobs this week:
Germany’s Ruhr Valley Rises from Its Ashes
One of the most depressed areas in Europe is redefining itself as a center of green commerce by exploiting the global environmental movement. With an unemployment rate of 18%, the district of Hörde is one of Germany’s most disadvantaged regions but a new building project designed to be sustainable promises to attract businesses that will take the place of steel mills and coal mines that have been shut down over the years.
“We are trying to create a new urban environment. In Phoenix, there will be a completely new landscape of jobs, work, technology, business and services. Everything will be new, with up-to-date standards,” said Paul Blanke-Bartz of the city of Dortmund’s economic development agency.
Located in the Ruhr Valley, the Phoenix project aims to transform the area from an industrial center to a site with modern housing complex with 900 units and a lake that covers 28 acres. The transformation is predicted to create 10,000 jobs as the area aims to attract businesses looking to save money on land.
Vinod Khosla Talks Green
In a wide-ranging question-and-answer interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, leading environmental-sector investor Vinod Khosla discussed the advantages that green-collar jobs will have on local economies. “You know, one of the great things about most renewable technologies - not every technology, but many of them - is the jobs have to be local,” Khosla said. “When you’re talking about a power plant and power generation using solar thermal technology, the jobs will be where the plant is. They may be in Nevada or Arizona, but you can’t move them to China and ship power here from China. And by the way, the biggest beneficiary of these will be the rural economies, because whether it’s power plants or biofuel plants, you’re going to build them in agricultural areas.”
PHOTO: Jim Murphy (left) talks about greening the UK with discussion chair George Parker (center) of the Financial Times and France’s Jean-Pierre Jouyet.
Global Job Watch is a weekly feature of The Skilled Worker.
Tags: climate change, gordon brown, green europe, green-collar jobs, jim murphy, nicholas stern, nicolas sarkozy, ruhr valley, skilled workers, vinod khosla, world bank
