New Energy Jobs Won't Solve the U.S. Unemployment Problem
The Hard Facts That Will Spoil Campaign Promises
Article Summary and Author Biography
Republicans and Democrats alike have touted the energy sector as the key to solving the United States' employment problems. They are both wrong.
MICHAEL LEVI is David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment and Director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations.
U.S. President Barack Obama and the leading Republican candidates for president don't agree on much, particularly when it comes to jobs and energy. But they do appear to share a conviction that a vibrant energy sector is central to solving the U.S. unemployment problem. Obama has put clean energy jobs at the center of his economic message. On the Republican side, both Texas Governor Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, his rival, claim that the oil, gas, and coal industries is where the real future of American job growth lies, contrasting their approach with one that has produced the recent Solyndra debacle. Alas, on the one point on which everyone seemingly agrees, they are all wrong.
There is no doubt the energy sector could employ many more Americans. But exactly how many matters. The Republican candidates have made bold and concrete predictions. Perry is running on his record of job creation in Texas, which included a big boost from the booming oil and gas sector employment. Romney claims that expanded drilling could create 1.2 million energy jobs and that shale gas operations in the Northeast could add another 280,000 and Perry offers similar numbers. This is an exaggeration. The American Petroleum Institute, which is hardly an impartial arbiter (it is the oil industry lobby), projects that opening all U.S. lands to drilling while loosening a range of regulations would create 400,000 new energy-sector jobs and perhaps one million support and spinoff jobs by 2030. The real potential for oil and gas jobs is smaller.
For his part, Obama placed clean-energy jobs at the core of his economic recovery plans, promising five million by 2030 if his energy plans were enacted into law. The Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning think tank that is inclined to be favorable to the president, estimated that his plans could have actually created about 1.8 million jobs at clean-energy businesses and their suppliers. Either way, Republicans and some Democrats have blocked most of the clean energy policies that the president advocated...
