The thought of revitalizing the economy with green jobs is inspiring, but how will it actually work? What will those jobs look like? Duke University just released a study that starts to answer that question. It looks at five industries, including LED lighting and concentrating solar power. For each, researchers asked what the value chain is and how jobs could be created.

And right on the heels of that study is this story from CBS News: Former Maytag employees in Iowa are finding new manufacturing jobs making parts for windmills. It’s a great example of the connection between climate solutions and U.S. jobs.

Jackie Roberts is our director for sustainable technologies.

In a video message delivered this week to a bipartisan group of governors at a global warming summit in California, President-Elect Obama made it clear that his climate change priorities start with a cap and trade system to reduce America’s global warming pollution and unleash a clean energy revolution.

My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process. That will start with a federal cap-and-trade system. We’ll establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020, and reduce them an additional 80% by 2050. Further, we’ll invest $15 billion each year to catalyze private-sector efforts to build a clean-energy future.

It’s a momentous statement that lights the fuse for climate change legislation in 2009. This is exactly what America and the world needs now – a strong cap-and-trade bill will jump-start job creation in new energy industries, and take a huge step toward solving climate change.

This post is by Tony Kreindler, media director for the National Climate Campaign at Environmental Defense Fund.

There’s a lot of buzz right now about the potential for "green" economic stimulus – policies and investments that grow the economy, create jobs, and protect the planet at the same time.

• Treehugger reports that energy efficiency investment in California has led to 1.5 million new jobs and $56 billion in savings between 1972 and 2006.
• An editorial in the Seattle Times explains how heavy investment in green infrastructure can put people back to work as well as solve the climate crisis.
• A post on Gristmill cites Paul Krugman’s argument that federal spending is the only way out of our economic woes, and suggests that this spending should include a Green Jobs program.

Investing in projects to repair and update our aging infrastructure would pay off in new jobs and a more efficient America. But where will the money come from? Stuck between pay-as-you-go rules and no new middle-class taxes, Congress doesn’t have a lot of options. One could be the auction of pollution allowances under a national greenhouse gas emissions cap. Estimates are that an auction could generate somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 billion per year.

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The State of Florida just issued a final report on energy and climate change with some hopeful findings. Its policy recommendations would not only reduce Florida’s greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, but also save the state $28 billion:

The total net cost savings of all Action Team recommendations combined is more than $28 billion from 2009 to 2025. Additionally, the recommendations would increase Florida’s energy security by reducing our dependence on fossil fuels resulting in a total fuel savings of 53.5 billion gallons of petroleum, 200.2 million short tons of coal, and 6.394 billion ft.³ of natural gas during the period of 2009 through 2025.

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There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the financial meltdown making lawmakers think that climate change legislation is less urgent. But while we worry about the financial markets, global warming marches relentlessly on. The science knows nothing of credit markets and there will be no pause in the march towards catastrophe while we work that out.

In fact, climate change legislation could well solve both problems. David Roberts talked about this at length in a post this week on Gristmill. Here’s an excerpt:

Greens and economists need to be making the point that these green investments are not something we need to do in spite of economic woes, or in conjunction with measures to turn the economy around. They are the measures to turn the economy around. Kudos to Cathy Zoi of We for making the case, but she could use some backup.

There won’t be much time to do something serious on climate. The news from scientists looks worse and worse every day.

This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.

This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine had a cover story on green investment titled "Capitalism to the Rescue". We’ve mentioned in other posts that venture capital investment in clean energy is on the rise. This article was interesting in that it profiled one particular venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins. The author interviewed the firm’s partners about why they see clean energy as such a good investment.

To start with, explained partner Randy Komisar, the current energy market is so large and outdated that "green-tech" is a huge and relatively low-risk opportunity. And we’re not, as many think, waiting for the new inventions to come. We’re waiting for federal policy to give private investment incentive. That is, we’re waiting for a mandatory carbon cap.

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Today we’re launching a resource for people who want to enter the green job market. Our new Green Jobs Guidebook is a first of its kind, addressing everything from where to get training, to where to find good-paying jobs that help the environment. The guide focuses on California, but much of the information is applicable anywhere in the country.

I co-authored the guide with California Green Jobs Associate Amy Pasciucco. Together we painstakingly researched green employment opportunities and expected salaries, compiled growth projections, and identified the experience and education levels required by employers.

And we didn’t stop there.

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Former President Bill Clinton gave an interesting analysis last night on the Late Show with David Letterman of how we got into our current economic mess. It all started at the beginning of the decade with lots of money to invest and no place to invest it. (For more on this, listen to the excellent report from This American Life on "The Giant Pool of Money".) Since most of the economic activity at this time was in real estate, investment bankers invented something called "mortgage-backed securities". This worked well and they wanted more, so lenders started giving mortgages to people with no ability to repay them – leading to the current mess.

We could have avoided this problem, Clinton said, if government had provided incentives for investment in the next big thing – clean energy.

EDF’s position is that the green economy is our best hope for the future. The incentive we need to make this happen is a cap on global warming pollution.

This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.

A month ago, July unemployment, at 5.7 percent, was the highest in four years. The August numbers just came in, and they’re even worse – 6.1 percent unemployment, the highest in five years.

But as I wrote last month, there is a solution: the green economy. Jobs related to new energy technologies are the one area of the market that is growing, and at a rapid pace.

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This post is by Nat Keohane, Ph.D., director of economic policy and analysis at Environmental Defense Fund.

When our media team opened up this morning’s Washington Post, they were delighted to see that Environmental Defense Fund was featured in an article about high energy prices and the connection to climate policy. Delighted, that is, until they read the article – which badly misrepresents our views.

Discussing the potential for perverse incentives from high gas prices in the absence of a cap on carbon, the reporter wrote:

The way to fix that would be a carbon tax or some other mechanism that would reflect the environmental cost of greenhouse gas emissions, Keohane said.

Those of you familiar with climate policy might have just spit out your coffee. EDF calling for a carbon tax? What gives?

In fact, I said nothing of the sort.

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