The organization Green for All, which unites green jobs advocates from disadvantaged communities around the country, drew 1,000 people to a conference in Memphis on the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Under the name “The Dream Reborn,” the conference called for $1 billion by 2012 to create “green pathways out of poverty” for 250,000 Americans by greatly expanding federal government and private sector commitments to green jobs.
United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club have created a Blue-Green Alliance whose recent “Green Jobs, Good Jobs” conference in Pittsburgh also drew nearly 1,000 participants to demand public policies in support of green jobs.
The new climate protection campaign 1Sky is also calling for 5 million new jobs as part of a national mobilization for climate solutions.
Such grassroots energy has sparked state and federal action on green jobs. Washington state recently adopted the “Climate Action and Green Jobs” act, which funds colleges and technical programs that train workers for the jobs that will be required to reduce greenhouse gases. The act sets a goal of adding 25,000 green-collar jobs by 2050, and it makes Washington the fourth state—along with California, New Jersey, and Hawaii—to pass comprehensive binding limits on greenhouse gases.
At the federal level, tax incentives for clean energy and green jobs, which failed to make it beyond the early versions of the federal economic stimulus bill, are being considered for a second stimulus package.
And although the Bush administration has fought other attempts to address global warming, President Bush has gotten behind green jobs. At the end of 2007, Bush signed the Green Jobs Act, which provides $125 million for workforce training programs that target veterans, displaced workers, at-risk youth, and individual families who fall below 200 percent of the federal poverty line.
Meanwhile, candidates on all sides of the presidential race are calling for green economic investments. Senator McCain, for example, has pledged to create “profit-making [green] business” and “stimulate green technologies.”
Proponents believe green jobs will be a win-win on a big scale. A recent study by the Blue-Green Alliance shows that renewable energy investments could generate more than 820,000 new jobs across the U.S.
“The … green economy can generate a lot of good jobs at a far greater scale than a pollution-based economy,” says Jason Walsh of Green for All.